Decoded

1

This man’s surname was Zheng, and he walked with a limp. Perhaps because of this striking characteristic, it seemed as though he did not need a personal name — that it was an unnecessary ornament, like wearing a piece of jewellery. He will appear at various crucial junctures in this narrative — some of the time he will be anonymous and some of the time he will be referred to by the name Zheng the Gimp.

‘Zheng the Gimp!’

‘Zheng the Gimp!’

The mere fact that people were happy to call him that tells you one important fact about the man — his life was not defined by his physical disability. If you think about it, there are two possible reasons for such a reaction: One, that Zheng the Gimp got that way as the result of an honourable wound — it was the proof that he had once carried a gun and fought side-by-side with his comrades. Two, that Zheng the Gimp’s leg wasn’t that bad — it was just that his left leg was a little bit shorter than his right. When he was younger, such a difference could have been corrected by wearing a shoe with a thicker sole on the relevant foot, but once he got past fifty, he was reduced to walking with a cane. When I met him, he walked with a stick, but he was not the kind of old man that you can possibly overlook. This was in the early 1990s.

That summer, the summer of 1956, Zheng the Gimp was still in his thirties — a strong and healthy young man. Thanks to the built-up soles of the shoes he wore on his left foot, nobody realized his physical problems — his limp disappeared and to the outside observer, he looked pretty much like anyone else. It was purely by chance that the people at the university discovered what was wrong with him.

This is how it all came about. The afternoon of the day that Zheng the Gimp came to the university, the entire student body was in the main auditorium, listening to a report about the amazing feats of valour achieved by the heroes of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. The campus was very quiet and the weather was lovely. It was not roasting hot, that day, and there was a light breeze blowing, fluttering the leaves of the avenue of French plane trees growing on either side of the road. That light susurration made the university seem even quieter than it actually was. He found the peace of the place so striking that he decided to order his jeep to stop — telling the driver to come back three days later to collect him from the university guest house. He got out of the car and started walking through the grounds alone. Some fifteen years earlier, he had spent three years at the attached high school, followed by the freshman year at the university. After such a long absence, he was keenly aware of the changes that had overtaken his alma mater and he was overtaken by a strange sense of nostalgia — many memories from the past seemed to press around him as he walked slowly along, as if called to life by his footsteps. When the presentation for the students finished, he was standing just outside the auditorium. The crowd poured out of the hall, spreading out like a flood. In an instant, he found himself engulfed, surrounded on all sides. He followed the crowd nervously, worried that someone might bump into him; because thanks to his gammy leg, if he fell it would be impossible for him to get up. The students continued coming and he found himself being moved to the back of the crowd, but these stragglers picked him up and marched along, shoulder to shoulder. The young people around him were careful, though; every time it seemed as though someone were just about to knock him down, they moved away just in time to prevent a collision. Nobody looked back, nobody seemed to have so much as noticed him; clearly his special shoe hid his condition from all casual observers. Maybe knowing this gave him confidence; anyway, he started to feel a sudden affection for this band of students, male and female, so bright and lively, chatting with each other; like a bubbling stream carrying him along. He felt himself rejuvenated — time had rolled back fifteen years.

When they arrived at the playing field, the crowd broke up the way a wave does when it hits the sand. He was now in no danger of being knocked off his feet. It was just at that moment that he suddenly felt something fall against the back of his neck. Before he had time to react, the crowd were already beginning to shout: ‘Rain!’ ‘It’s raining!’ When this cry first went up, people didn’t move, they just looked up at the sky. A moment later, the first drops were followed by a huge bolt of lightning, and then the rain really did begin to hammer down, as if someone had turned on a high-pressure hose. Immediately the crowd began to scatter like a flock of frightened hens — some were running forward, others had turned back towards the auditorium, some were rushing towards nearby buildings, some were heading for the bike sheds. As people ran around shouting at each other, the playing field was reduced to chaos. He was now in a real fix — he couldn’t run and he couldn’t not run: if he ran people would realize that he had a gammy leg; if he didn’t run he was going to get soaked. Maybe he didn’t even particularly want to run — he had faced the full force of enemy fire so why should he be scared of rain? Of course he wasn’t bothered by the prospect of getting wet. But his feet were obeying commands from some other part of his brain — he was starting to hop forward, one foot striking out, the other dragging behind. That was the way he had to run, the way a lame man runs, one leap at a time, as if there was a shard of glass stuck in the bottom of his shoe.

When he first started, everyone else was too busy running themselves to pay any attention to him. Later on, when they had found sanctuary in nearby buildings, he was still in the middle of the playing field. He hadn’t wanted to run in the first place, he was hampered by his gammy leg, he was still carrying his suitcase — no wonder he was so slow! No wonder everyone else had vanished! Now, in the whole of that massive playing field, he was the only person to be seen — he stuck out like a sore thumb. Once he realized that, he decided to get away from the playing field as quickly as possible, but that meant having to hop even faster. It was valiant, it was comical; to the people watching, it seemed like this was all part of the spectacle. Some people even started to shout encouragement at him.

‘Faster!’

‘Faster!’

Once the cry of ‘Faster!’ went up, it attracted the attention of even more people. It seemed as if all eyes were fixed on him — he felt almost nailed in place by their stares. He immediately decided to stop, cheerfully waving his hands in the air: a gesture of appreciation for the people who had shouted encouragement to him. Afterwards he began to walk forward, a smile on his face, like an actor leaving the stage. At that moment, seeing him walk normally, it looked as if his hopping run had been put on: a performance. In reality, something that he tried to cover up had been glaringly revealed to everyone. You could say that this sudden rainstorm forced him to play a role which disclosed the secret of his gammy leg — on the one hand this embarrassed him, and on the other, it made sure that everyone recognized him as. . a gimp! An amusing and friendly gimp. The fact is that when he left this place fifteen years earlier, having spent four years there, nobody noticed that he had gone. However, this time, in the space of just a couple of minutes, he had become famous throughout the university. A couple of days later, when he took Jinzhen away on his mysterious mission, everyone said, ‘It was the cripple who danced in the rain that took him away.’

2

He had come to take someone away.

Someone like him came to N University every year in the summer, wanting to take people away. Whoever came in any particular year had certain distinguishing features, no matter what they looked like. They seemed to be able to call on considerable resources; they were very mysterious; and the minute they arrived, they would go straight to the office of the chancellor of the university. On this occasion the chancellor’s office was empty, so he left and went to the office next door, which belonged to the registrar. As it happened, that was where the chancellor was, discussing something with the registrar. The moment he entered, he announced that he was looking for the chancellor. The registrar asked who he was. He said with a laugh, ‘I am a coper, looking for horses.’

The registrar said, ‘Then you ought to go to the Student Centre: it’s on the first floor.’

‘I need to talk to the chancellor first,’ he said.

‘Why?’ asked the registrar.

‘I have something here that the chancellor needs to see.’

‘What is it? Give it to me.’

‘Are you the chancellor? It is for his eyes only,’ he said aggressively.

The registrar looked at the chancellor. The chancellor said, ‘Let me have a look at whatever it is.’

Once he was sure that the person he was speaking to was indeed the chancellor of the university, he opened his briefcase and took out a file. The file was perfectly ordinary, the kind made out of card — somewhat like the kind of things that schoolteachers use. He took a single-page document out of the file and handed it to the chancellor, asking him to read it.

Having taken the document, the chancellor stepped back a pace or two and read it. The registrar could only see the back. As far as he could see the paper was not particularly large, nor was it particularly thick, nor were there any special seals or stamps attached to it. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary letter of introduction. However, judging by the chancellor’s reaction, there was clearly more to it. He noticed particularly that the chancellor seemed to just run his eye over the paper — maybe he only looked at the letterhead at the top — before immediately becoming much more serious and concerned.

‘Are you Section Chief Zheng?’

‘I am.’

‘I do apologize for your reception, sir.’ The chancellor was all smiles as he invited the man into his own office.

Nobody had the first idea as to what kind of organization could produce a letter that would have quite that kind of result, making the chancellor so very obsequious. The registrar thought that he would be able to find out: according to the rules of the university, all letters of introduction from external work-units had to be filed with his office. Later on, when he realized that the chancellor had not handed over the document as he should have done, he went to the trouble of putting in a request for it. He was not expecting the chancellor to say that he had burned it. The chancellor went on to explain that the very first sentence in the letter was that it should be destroyed immediately after it was read. The registrar was startled into an exclamation: ‘Top secret!’ The chancellor told him sternly that he was to forget all that had happened and not to mention it to anyone.

In actual fact, when the chancellor was showing the man into his office, he already had a box of matches ready in his hand. When the chancellor had finished reading the letter, he struck a match and said, ‘Shall I burn it?’

‘Why not?’

So the letter was burnt.

The two men stood there in silence, neither saying a word, as the paper went up in flames.

Afterwards, the chancellor asked, ‘How many people do you want?’

He held up a finger: ‘One.’

Then the chancellor asked, ‘What field?’

He opened up the file again and took out another piece of paper. He said: ‘This is my list of the requirements that whoever it is must fulfil — it is probably not complete but there is enough to give you an idea.’

The paper that he held out was exactly the same size as the previous letter, sextodecimo. There was no letterhead printed on this sheet though, and the words on it were written by hand, rather than being typed. The chancellor ran his eye down the list and then asked,‘Is this another one where it has to be burnt as soon as I have read it?’

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘You think this is also top secret?’

‘I haven’t read it properly yet,’ the chancellor said, ‘so I don’t know whether it is top secret or not.’

‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘You can show it to anyone you like, even to students. Anyone who thinks that they fit this set of requirements can come and find me. I will be staying in Room 302 in the guest house attached to your university — you are welcome to turn up whenever you like.’

That evening, the chancellor of the university took two final-year students with particularly high grades to Room 302. Afterwards a constant stream of visitors arrived. By the afternoon of the third day twenty-two students had gone to Room 302 to meet the mysterious man with a limp: some were brought by their professors; some came under their own steam. The vast majority were students in the mathematics department. There were nine undergraduates and seven graduate students from that one department; the people who came from other departments were all taking specials in mathematics. Mathematical ability was the first requirement that Zheng the Gimp had set down for the person that he wanted — in fact, it was virtually the only condition. The thing is that the people who had gone in to see him had a very different story to tell once they came out again — they said it was a totally bizarre experience. They were inclined to think that it was all a joke of some kind, or at the very least not as serious as they had been led to believe. As for Zheng the Gimp — if you had listened to them you would have thought he was a lunatic, a psycho with a gammy leg! Some of them said that when they went into the room, he paid no attention to them at all. They stood there or sat there for a bit, feeling like complete fools, and then Zheng the Gimp waved them away, telling them to leave. Some of the professors in the mathematics department were so upset at what their students were telling them that they rushed round to the university guest house to complain to the lame man in person, asking him what on earth he thought he was doing? Why was he sending people away without asking them any questions? The only answer that they got was that it was his way of doing things.

What Zheng the Gimp said was, ‘Every discipline has its own requirements, right? In physical education they pick athletes by feeling their bones. The person I am looking for has to have an independent mind-set. Some people were really uncomfortable about the fact that I didn’t pay any attention to them — they couldn’t even sit still, nor could they stand up straight and not fidget. They found the whole experience extremely unsettling. That is not the kind of personality I am looking for.’

That sounds very fine, but only Zheng the Gimp knew whether he was telling the truth or not.

On the afternoon of the third day of his stay, Zheng the Gimp invited the chancellor of the university to visit him at the guest house, to discuss his search. He wasn’t very happy, but he had got something out of it. He gave the chancellor five names from the list of the twenty-two people he had interviewed and requested permission to see their personal dossiers — he thought that the person he was looking for would most likely be one of these five. When the chancellor realized that the whole thing was in its final phase and that Zheng the Gimp was proposing to leave the following day, he stayed behind at the guest house to eat a simple dinner with him. While they were still at table Zheng the Gimp seemed to suddenly remember something. He asked the chancellor about what had happened to Young Lillie, and the chancellor explained. He said, ‘If you would like to see the retired chancellor, I will tell him to come.’

Zheng said with a smile, ‘How could I possibly ask him to come and see me? I should go and visit him!’

And just as he had said, that very evening, Zheng the Gimp went to see Young Lillie. .[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

It was I who went and opened the door for him. I didn’t recognize him and I didn’t know that he was the mysterious man who had been the subject of so much gossip in the department over recent days. To begin with Daddy didn’t know anything about what was going on, but some of the people in the department had been dragging people off to meet the mystery man at a rate of knots, and I had happened to mention this to him. When Daddy realized that Zheng was one and the same as the mysterious man that everyone was talking about, he called me over and introduced me. I was very curious and asked what exactly it was that he wanted someone for. He didn’t answer my question directly; he just said it was important work. When I asked what kind of important we were talking about — for humanity or the development of the country or what — he said it was a matter of national security. I asked him how the selection process had gone, but he didn’t seem very satisfied — he muttered something about picking the tallest out of a group of dwarves.

He must have discussed the whole thing with Daddy at some point in the past, because Daddy seemed to know exactly what kind of person he was looking for. Seeing him so unhappy with the results of his search, Daddy said in a joking kind of voice, ‘The fact is that I know of someone very suitable.’‘Who?’ He immediately pricked up his ears.

Daddy, still in a joking tone of voice, said, ‘Someone suitable might be the other side of the globe; on the other hand they might also be right here with you. . ’

He thought that Daddy was talking about me and immediately started asking about my work. Daddy just pointed to a photo of Zhendi pushed into the frame of the mirror on the wall and said: ‘Him.’‘Who is he?’ he asked.

Daddy pointed to the photograph of my aunt, Rong Lillie, and said, ‘Don’t they look alike?’

He went over to the mirror and had a good look; then he said: ‘They do.’

‘That’s her grandson,’ Daddy said.

As far as I can remember, Daddy didn’t often introduce Zhendi to people like that — in fact it was practically the first time. I don’t know why he spoke to the man in that way; perhaps it was because he wasn’t local — he didn’t know more than the bare outlines of the story so it did not matter so much. On the other hand he was a graduate of our university, so he would know who my aunt was. After Daddy had said that, he started asking us excited questions about Zhendi. Daddy was perfectly happy to tell him all sorts of things about Zhendi, all about how clever he was. Nevertheless, right at the end of their conversation, Daddy still told him not to think about trying to take Zhendi away. When he asked why, Daddy said: ‘The research institute needs him.’

He smiled and said nothing. He didn’t return to the subject again, so we had the impression that he had put the matter of Zhendi aside.

The following morning, Zhendi came home for breakfast. He told us that someone had come to find him really late the previous night. Because the facilities at the research institute were so excellent, Zhendi often spent the entire night there, sleeping in his office, coming home only for meals. The moment he spoke up, Daddy knew exactly who had gone to find him. He burst out laughing and said. ‘Clearly he hasn’t given up yet.’

‘Who is he?’ Zhendi asked.

‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ said Daddy.

‘I think he wants me to go and join his work unit,’ Zhendi said.

‘Do you want to go?’ asked Daddy.

‘That is up to you,’ said Zhendi.

‘Then ignore him,’ Daddy said.

Just as they were talking, there was a knock on the door and Zheng walked in. When Daddy caught sight of him, he began by asking very politely if he had had breakfast already — he said he had eaten at the guest house. Daddy asked him to go upstairs and wait, that he would be finished soon. When he had finished eating, Daddy told Zhendi to go away. He said exactly the same thing as he had said before: ‘Don’t pay any attention to him.’

After Zhendi left, Daddy and I walked upstairs together. Zheng was waiting in the sitting room, smoking a cigarette. Daddy might have looked very courteous and polite, but his meaning was quite plain. Daddy asked him if he was here to say goodbye or because he wanted someone. ‘If you are here because you want him, then I am afraid I can’t help you. As I told you last night, I don’t want you taking him away from me — there is no point.’

‘If you can’t help then you can’t help,’ he said. ‘I will just say goodbye.’

Daddy asked him to go into his study.

I had a class that afternoon, so after a few pleasantries, I went to my room to collect the things I needed. On my way out, a little bit later, I thought I should go and say goodbye. However, the door to Daddy’s study was closed, something that very rarely happened. I decided not to disturb them and went off. When I got back after my class, Mummy told me sadly that Zhendi would be leaving us. I asked where he was going and Mummy had to wipe away her tears before she could reply. ‘He is going with that man. Your father has agreed. . ’

[To be continued]

Nobody knows what Zheng the Gimp said to Young Lillie in his study that day, behind closed doors. Master Rong told me that until the day he died, her father refused to answer questions on the subject — if anyone mentioned it, he would get angry. He was clearly determined to take this secret to the grave. One thing is perfectly clear and that is that Zheng the Gimp managed to change Young Lillie’s mind in the space of just over half an hour. Whatever it was that he said, when Young Lillie walked out of his study, he went straight to tell his wife that Jinzhen was leaving.These events made Zheng the Gimp even more mysterious, and now an atmosphere of secrecy began to envelope Jinzhen too.

3

Jinzhen began to become mysterious that very afternoon — the afternoon that Zheng the Gimp and Young Lillie shut the door to his study to talk in private. It was that afternoon that Zheng the Gimp collected him in the jeep and took him away — he did not return home until the evening. He was brought back in an ordinary car. Once he got home, there was already a secretive look in his eyes. Faced with the questioning glances of his family, it was a long time before he opened his mouth. Everything he did now seemed to be touched with mystery. Having gone away with Zheng the Gimp for just a couple of hours, it seemed as though a wedge had already been driven between him and his family. After a very long time, and repeated questioning from Young Lillie, he sighed deeply and then said hesitantly, using the same respectful term of address as usual, ‘Professor, you have sent me somewhere that really doesn’t suit me.’ He spoke lightly but the words had underlying implications that horrified everyone present: Young Lillie, his wife, and Master Rong. They had no idea what to say next.

Mrs Lillie said, ‘If you don’t want to go then don’t — it’s not as if you have to.’

‘I have to go,’ Jinzhen said.

‘What are you talking about? He — ’ she pointed to Young Lillie ‘ — is he and you are you: if he wants you to do something it does not automatically mean that you have to agree. Listen to me. Decide what you want to do for yourself. If you want to go then go; if you don’t want to go then don’t — I will talk to them for you.’

‘That won’t work,’ said Jinzhen.

‘What do you mean it won’t work?’

‘If they want me to go, I don’t have the right to refuse.’

‘What kind of work unit is that? Who has such powers?’

‘I am not allowed to tell you.’

‘You are not allowed to tell you own mother?’

‘I am not allowed to tell anyone. I had to swear. . ’

Just then, Young Lillie clapped his hands and stood up. He said seriously, ‘Right, in that case you must not say another word. When are you leaving? Has it been decided yet? We need to pack your things.’

‘I am leaving before dawn tomorrow morning,’ Jinzhen said.

Nobody got any sleep that night, because everyone was busy packing Zhendi’s belongings. At around four o’clock in the morning, his stuff was pretty much packed — his books and his winter clothes had been corded into two cardboard boxes. After that it only remained to collect some daily necessities: even though Jinzhen and Young Lillie both said he could buy whatever he needed when he got there, the two women were both in packing mode and rushed up and down the stairs, racking their brains for anything that he could possibly need. First they put in a radio and some packets of cigarettes, then tea leaves and a first-aid kit — they managed to fill a leather suitcase with the fruit of their labours. At about five o’clock in the morning, everyone met downstairs. Mrs Lillie was almost hysterical — she could not possibly make breakfast for Jinzhen that morning, so she had to ask her daughter to do it for her. She went with her to the kitchen and sat there, explaining exactly what it was that she had to do. That was not because Master Rong couldn’t cook, but because this was to be a very special meal — they were saying goodbye to Jinzhen. Mrs Lillie was determined that this meal had to comprise four important elements.

1. The main dish was going to be a bowl of noodles, just like the kind that people eat on their birthdays to symbolize many happy returns of the day.

2. The noodles had to be made of buckwheat. Buckwheat noodles are softer than the ordinary kind. This would symbolize that people have to be more forgiving and flexible when they are among strangers.

3. The flavourings for this noodle soup should include vinegar, chilli peppers and walnuts. Walnuts are bitter. This would symbolize that of the four flavours, bitterness, sourness and spiciness would be left behind at home; once he left everything would be sweet.

4. Not too much soup was to be made, because when the time came, Jinzhen was supposed to drink every last drop, to symbolize completeness and success.

It was just a bowl of soup, but it represented all the old lady’s fondest hopes and wishes for him. When this meaningful bowl of soup was brought bubbling into the dining room, Mrs Lillie called Jinzhen to table. She took a jade pendant, in the shape of a crouching tiger, out of her pocket and put it in Jinzhen’s hands, telling him to eat up and then tie this to his belt, where it would bring him good luck. Just then, they heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Shortly afterwards, Zheng the Gimp came in with his chauffeur. He said hello to everyone and told the chauffeur to put the boxes in the car.

Jinzhen sat there quietly eating his noodles. Once he started eating, he did not say anything, but it was the kind of silence that you get when someone has a great deal that they want to say but no idea where to start. Even when he had finished his noodles, he sat there without a word. He clearly had no intention of getting up.

Zheng the Gimp came in and clapped him on the back, as if he were in complete charge of the situation. He said, ‘It is time to say goodbye. I will be waiting for you in the car.’ He said goodbye to Young Lillie, his wife, and Master Rong, and then left.

The room fell silent. The people present looked quietly at one another; their gaze became concentrated, fixed. Jinzhen was still holding onto his jade. He was stroking it with one hand. That was the only movement in the room.Mrs Lillie said: ‘Tie it onto your belt. It will bring you good luck.’

Jinzhen put the jade up to his lips and kissed it, after which he started to tie it onto his belt.

It was just at that moment that Young Lillie took the jade out of his hands and said: ‘Only a fool would expect something to bring him good luck. You are a genius and you are going to make your own luck.’ He took out the Waterman pen that he had used for nearly half a century and put it in Jinzhen’s hands, saying: ‘You will find this much more useful. You can use it to make a note of your ideas. If you don’t let them run away from you, you will find that no one can even come close to you.’

Jinzhen did exactly the same thing. He kissed the pen in silence and then put it in his breast-pocket. At that moment, they heard the brief blast of a car horn coming from outside — very short. Jinzhen didn’t seem to have noticed it; he sat there without moving.

Young Lillie said, ‘They are trying to hurry you up. Off you go.’

Jinzhen sat there, without moving.

Young Lillie said, ‘You are going to be working for the nation — you should be happy.’

Jinzhen continued to sit there without moving.

Young Lillie said, ‘This house is your home. When you leave this house, you are in your country. If you have no country you can have no home. Go on. They are waiting for you.’

Jinzhen sat there, unmoving. It was as if the sorrow of parting had nailed him to his chair. He couldn’t move!

There was another blast from the horn of the waiting car. This time it was much longer. Young Lillie realized that Jinzhen was still showing no signs of going, so he glanced at his wife, wanting her to say something.

Mrs Lillie stepped forward, resting her two hands lightly on Jinzhen’s shoulders. She said, ‘Off you go, Zhendi. You have to go. I will be waiting for your letters.’

It seemed as though the touch of the old lady’s hands had woken Jinzhen from his sleep. With a curious stumbling motion, he rose to his feet, moving as if in a trance. When he got to the door, Jinzhen suddenly turned round and fell to his knees with a thud. He kowtowed to the old couple with resounding knocks of the head. In a voice choked with tears, he said, ‘Mum, I am leaving now. But even if I go to the ends of the earth, I am still your son. . ’

It was five o’clock in the morning, on 11 June 1956. Jinzhen, the star of the mathematics department for the last ten years, a man who had quietly become a fixture at N University, upped and left on a mysterious journey from which he never returned. Before he left, he requested permission from the old couple to change his name — in future he wanted to be called Rong Jinzhen. He said goodbye to his family and embarked upon a new life with a new name — an already tear-soaked parting was now rendered even more upsetting, as if both sides were aware that this was no ordinary separation. The fact is that when he left, no one knew where Rong Jinzhen went. He got into the jeep just as dawn was breaking and it took him away — he disappeared into another world. He simply vanished. It was as if his new name and his new identity fell like an axe, separating his past from his future, marking his departure from the mundane world. All that anyone knew was that he had gone somewhere else — the only contact address that they had was right there in the provincial capital: Box No. 36.

It seemed that he was really close by, right beside them.

But in fact no one knew where he had gone. .[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

I asked a couple of my former students who had ended up working for the post office, what work unit had Box No. 36 and where was it? They all said that they did not know — it seemed to be an address for somewhere beyond human ken. To begin with we all thought it was a box associated with an address somewhere in the city, but when we got the first letter that Zhendi posted to us, the amount of time it had taken since posting told us that the local address was just a fake, designed to mislead people. He might well be a very long way away from us, maybe even further than we could imagine.

The first letter that he wrote to us was written three days after he left, but we received it twelve days later. There was no indication on the envelope of a sender’s address — where that would normally have been written there was one of Chairman Mao’s slogans: ‘Who Dares to Make the Sun and Moon Shine in New Skies?’ It was printed in Chairman Mao’s calligraphy, in red ink. The strangest thing was that there was no frank from the post office from which the letter was sent, just a frank from the receiving sorting office. All the letters we received afterwards were the same: the same kind of envelope, the same lack of a post office frank, and roughly the same amount of time spent en route — around eight or nine days. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the quotation from Chairman Mao was exchanged for a line from a really popular song of the era: ‘Sailing Across the Ocean, We Rely on the Helmsman’. Everything else stayed the same.

What does it mean, working for National Security? I got to know at least a little bit about it from the letters that Zhendi sent home.

In the winter of the year that Zhendi left us, in December, there was a terrible storm one evening and the temperature simply plummeted. After supper, Daddy told us that he had a bit of a headache — probably because of the change in the weather — and so after taking a couple of aspirin, he went upstairs to go to bed even though it was still early. A couple of hours later, when Mummy went to bed, she found that he had stopped breathing, though his body was still warm. The way that Daddy died. . it seemed as though the couple of aspirins he took before bedtime might as well have been arsenic; now that Zhendi was gone he knew that his research institute working on artificial intelligence was going to collapse, so he took this way out.

Of course, that is not what happened at all — the fact is that Daddy died of a brain haemorrhage.

We debated whether or not we should ask Zhendi to come back — after all he had not been gone for long and he was now attached to a very mysterious and powerful work unit — not to mention the fact that he was so far away — we had already discovered by that time that Zhendi was not at the provincial capital. In the end Mummy decided to call him back. She said, ‘Since his surname is Rong, since he calls me “Mother”, he is our son — his father is dead so of course we ought to call him back.’ So we sent Zhendi a telegram asking him to come back for the funeral.

The person who came was a complete stranger. He brought an enormous wreath of flowers with him, which he laid on behalf of Rong Jinzhen. It was the largest of any of the wreaths at the funeral, not that that was much consolation. The whole thing upset us very much. You see, given what we knew of Zhendi, if it was at all possible he would have wanted to be there in person. He was a very highly principled person: if it was something that he thought was right he would find a way to do it — he was not the sort of person to be put off by inconvenience or difficulty. We thought a lot about why it was that he had not been able to come for the funeral. I don’t know why — maybe it was because the man who came spoke so very evasively — I got the impression that it was most unlikely that Zhendi would ever come back, no matter what happened to the rest of us. He said something about how he was a very close friend of Zhendi’s and was here on his behalf. On the other hand there was also a lot about how he couldn’t answer that question, or that this subject was something he couldn’t discuss, and so on and so forth. The whole thing was very odd; I sometimes even found myself wondering if something had happened to Zhendi — maybe he was dead. Particularly given that afterwards the letters that he sent were so much shorter and came at much longer intervals. It went on year after year — letters came but we never got to see him. I was becoming more and more certain that Zhendi was dead. Working in a secret organization dedicated to preserving the security of the nation is a great honour, a great glory, but it would be perfectly possible for them to give the family of a dead person the impression that he was still alive — that would be one way of showing how powerful they are, how special the work that they do. Anyway, given that Zhendi didn’t come home from one year to the next, given that we never got to see him, never got to hear his voice — I became more and more certain that he was never coming back. The letters did nothing to convince me otherwise.

In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out. At the same time, the landmine that fate had planted under my feet some decades earlier exploded. There was a big-character poster put up to criticize me, saying that I was still in love with him (this referred to Master Rong’s ex-boyfriend), and after that there were a number of absolutely outrageous suggestions made. It was said that the reason I never married was because I was waiting for him, that loving him meant that I loved the KMT, that I was a KMT whore, that I was a KMT spy. They said all sorts of horrible things about me, and they were all presented in a very bald way, as incontrovertible facts.

On the afternoon of the day that the big-character poster went up, a couple of dozen students made a confused attempt to surround the house. Maybe thanks to Daddy’s reputation, they did a lot of shouting but they did not break in and drag me away — eventually the chancellor arrived just at the right moment to get them to leave. That was the first time I had ever been in any kind of trouble. I thought that this would be the end of it. They hadn’t behaved too badly, after all.

They came back a little over a month later. This time there were a couple of hundred people. They had a lot of important figures from the university, including the chancellor, under arrest. They burst into the house, grabbed hold of me and dragged me out. They put a dunce’s cap on my head with the words ‘KMT Whore’ written on it and I was thrust into the group who were there to be ‘struggled against’. They were going to start by parading us about the place like criminals, as an example to the populace. When that was over, I was imprisoned in a women’s lavatory, together with a woman professor from the chemistry department who was accused of immoral practices and bourgeois corruption. During the daytime they would take us out and beat us up, at night we were returned to our prison to write self-criticisms. After a while they shaved one half of our heads in the yin-yang style, making us look like nothing on earth. One day, Mummy saw me being struggled against and she was so horrified that she fainted dead away, right then and there.

Mummy was in hospital — I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. I was just one step away from death myself. That evening, I wrote a secret message to Zhendi — just one line: ‘If you are still alive, come back and rescue me!’ I signed it with my mother’s name. The next day, one of my students who felt sorry for me helped me to send it. Once the telegram had gone, I thought out the various possible options. It seemed most likely that I simply wouldn’t hear any response. The next most likely result was — like when Daddy died — that a stranger would come. I couldn’t imagine that Zhendi would be in a position to be able to come himself, not to mention that he would turn up quite so quickly. .

[To be continued]

That day Master Rong and her colleague were being ‘struggled against’ in front of the chemistry department building. The two of them were standing on the steps in front of the main building, wearing tall dunce’s caps on their heads, with heavy placards hung round their necks. There were red flags and posters hung to either side, while massed in front of them were students from the chemistry department and other professors — about two hundred people in all. They were sitting on mats on the ground. The people who had been selected to speak stood up. The whole thing looked to have been very carefully organized.

Starting at 10 o’clock in the morning, they alternated exposés of the pair’s evil actions with interrogations. At midday, they ate lunch on site (it was brought in). Master Rong and the other professor were ordered to recite sayings of Chairman Mao. By the time it got to 4 o’clock in the afternoon, neither of them could stand up any more. Faute de mieux, they were kneeling on the ground. It was then that a jeep with military number-plates drove up. It stopped in front of the chemistry department building, drawing all eyes. Three men got out. Two of them were very tall and they walked on either side of a short man, bracketing him. They marched right into the middle of this ‘struggle session’. When they approached the steps, a couple of the Red Guards on duty that day tried to stop them, asking them who they were. The short man in the middle said aggressively, ‘We have come to take Rong Yinyi away!’

‘Who are you?’

‘The people who are going to take her away!’

One of the Red Guards, incensed by his casual attitude, warnedhim in a loud voice: ‘She is a KMT whore, you can’t take her away!’

The little man glared at him. Suddenly he spat on the ground and cursed: ‘Fuck you! If she is KMT, then what does that make me? Do you know who you are talking to? I am telling you, she is coming with me! Out of my way!’

As he spoke, he pushed the people blocking his path out of the way and marched up to the platform.

It was just at that moment that someone shouted from the back: ‘How dare he curse us Red Guards! Let’s beat him up!’

In the blink of an eye everyone was on their feet, pressing in, punching the man wildly. If no one had intervened, he would have been killed. Fortunately the people who had come with him moved in to protect him. They were both tall and strong — you could tell at a glance that they had had martial arts training. Pushing and pulling, the pair of them fought back against the attackers. The man was now standing in the middle of a circle, the other two protecting him on either side like bodyguards. They shouted in unison, ‘We work for Chairman Mao — anyone who hits us is anti-Chairman Mao, antiRed Guards! We are Chairman Mao’s guards — stand back! Stand back!’

Thanks to their courage and persistence, they were able to extract the little man from the crowd. One of them protected him as he ran. The other was running too, but then suddenly he turned round and whipped out a gun. Pointing it into the air, he fired a single shot. He shouted, ‘Do not move! Chairman Mao sent us here!’

Everyone was paralysed by the sound of the shot. They looked at him in amazement. At the back you could hear people shouting that Red Guards were not afraid to die, that there was nothing to be frightened of. It seemed like the situation was just about take a turn for the worse again when he took out his credentials — there was a bright red letterhead and a huge state seal on the envelope. Taking out the document inside, he held it up high so that everyone could see. ‘Look, we come from Chairman Mao! We have been entrusted with a mission by the Chairman himself! If anyone dares cause any more trouble, Chairman Mao will send someone to arrest him! Given that we are all working for the Chairman, can’t we sit down and discuss the matter properly? Let the comrades in charge here stand forward, so you can hear the orders we have been given by Chairman Mao!’

Two people stepped forward out of the scrum. The man put his gun away and took them off to one side to speak in private. Clearly they accepted whatever he said to them, since when they came back, they said that he was indeed working for Chairman Mao and that everyone should sit down in their seats. A little bit later, once calm had been restored, the other two came back again, having run a good long way. One of the Red Guard leaders went so far as to walk out to meet them and shake the little man’s hand. The other Red Guard leader introduced him to the assembled company as a hero of the revolution and asked them to give him a round of applause. Sporadic and lacklustre handclapping was heard, indicating that people had not been much impressed by this hero. Perhaps because he was afraid of further trouble, the man who had opened fire with his gun decided not to let the hero come over. He went to meet him and whispered a couple of words in his ear, telling him to get in the car. He shouted at the driver to take him away, while he himself stayed behind.

Just as the car drove away, the hero stuck his head out of the window and shouted, ‘Sis, don’t be scared. I am going to get someone to save you!’

It was Jinzhen!

Rong Jinzhen!

The sound of Rong Jinzhen’s voice rolled over the crowd. While the last notes were still hanging in the air, another jeep with military number-plates drove up with screeching tyres, coming to a halt just in front of Rong Jinzhen’s car.

Three men got out of the jeep. Two of them were wearing PLA uniform, indicating that they were military cadres. They walked straight over to the man with the gun and spoke a couple of words in his ear, then they introduced the third man. He was the head of the Red Guards at the university — people called him Marshal Yang.

They held a quiet conference next to the cars. Afterwards Marshal Yang walked over to the other Red Guards alone, a very serious expression on his face. He didn’t say anything to them — he just raised his fist and shouted, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ Other people took up the chant, shouting it so that the very buildings reverberated. Once that was over he turned round and jumped up the steps to remove Master Rong’s dunce’s cap and placard. He told the assembled company, ‘I swear by Chairman Mao, this woman is not a KMT whore but the sister of a national hero, a revolutionary comrade.’ He raised his fist and shouted over and over again: ‘Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the Red Guards! Long live our revolutionary comrades!’

Having repeated each slogan a couple of times, he took the Red Guard armband off his own arm and tied it onto Master Rong’s. As he did so, other people started shouting out the same slogans, as if it was a gesture of respect to Master Rong or something. Maybe they were trying to protect her; maybe by shouting out slogans like that they were hoping to distract people’s attention. Whatever the reason, Master Rong came to the end of her career as a counter-revolutionary to the sound of wave after wave of shouting. .[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

To tell you the truth, I didn’t recognize Zhendi when I saw him — he had been gone for ten years. He was much thinner than he had been before and he was wearing a pair of old-fashioned spectacles with lenses as thick as bottle glass — he looked like an old man. I didn’t believe that it could be him, right up until he called me ‘Sis’, and then I suddenly seemed to come to my senses. It still seems more than a little unreal to me. Even today, I sometimes wonder if what happened that day was not all a dream.

He arrived the day after my telegram was sent. To be able to get here so quickly, he must have been in the provincial capital anyway. Once he came back, it was clear in all sorts of different ways that he was both very powerful and extremely mysterious: he must have become a very important person. When he visited our house, the man with the gun didn’t leave his side for so much as a moment — it seemed like he was a bodyguard, or maybe just a guard. Zhendi didn’t seem to be allowed to do anything without his permission. When we were talking, he was butting in every five minutes — we weren’t allowed to ask such-and-such, or this topic was out of bounds. In the evening, the car brought dinner to our house — they said this was to save us the trouble of cooking but it looked to me like they were worried we were going to put something in the food. After dinner, he started chivvying Zhendi into leaving and it was only when Mummy and Zhendi both made a real fuss that he finally agreed that he could stay overnight. It must have seemed a most dangerous proceeding to him, because he called up two jeeps which parked right in front of our house, with seven or eight men inside. Some of them were in military uniform; some in plain clothes. He slept overnight in the same room as Zhendi, but before the pair of them went to bed he searched the whole house from top to bottom. The next day, when Zhendi asked to be allowed to go to Daddy’s tomb, he flatly refused.

The whole thing seemed completely unreal — Zhendi arrived, stayed the night and left again — all as if in a dream.

Even though he was able to come and visit us on this one occasion, Zhendi’s life over the last decade remained a complete mystery to us — it was even more mysterious when we were able to see him in the flesh. Really, the only two things we found out were that he was still alive and had got married. Apparently, he had not been married for long — his wife was part of the same work unit. Although we had no idea what she did or where she lived, we did find out that her surname was Di and that she came from somewhere in the north. Looking at the couple of photographs he had brought with him, we could see that she was a good bit taller than Zhendi, a nice-looking woman — but the expression in her eyes was sad. Just like Zhendi, it seemed that she was not good at expressing her emotions. Just before he left, Zhendi gave Mother a really fat envelope, which he said was from his wife. He asked that we wait until after he had left before looking at it. When we opened it, there were 200 yuan and a letter from his wife inside. The letter explained that the Party had refused permission for her to go with Zhendi on this visit and that she was really sorry about that. She called Mummy ‘Mother’; ‘Dear Mother’.

Three days after Zhendi left, a man representing his work unit turned up. He had been to our house before, representing Zhendi at the ceremonies for the anniversary of Daddy’s death. He gave us a document from the PLA Military Region headquarters and the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, written out on paper with a fat red letterhead. It said that Rong Jinzhen had been recognized as a hero of the revolution by the Central Politburo, the State Council and the Central Military Commission and thus by extension, we had become a revolutionary family. In the future, no work-unit, no member of the Communist Party, and no private individual would be able to enter our house without our permission. More importantly, in the future no one would be allowed to cast aspersions on the revolutionary credentials of a hero’s family. At the very top there was a hand-written comment — ‘Anyone disobeying this order will be treated as a counter-revolutionary and punished accordingly!’ That was written by the commander of the local Military Region himself. We treasured that letter! Thanks to it, we never had any trouble afterwards. Thanks to it, my brother was able to return to N University from Shanghai and later on, when he decided that he wanted to go abroad, it was that letter that got him permission. My brother was working on research into superconductors; at that time there was no way he could continue his work in this country! He had to leave. But think about it — think how difficult it was in those days if you wanted to go abroad. In many ways, that was a very special time, and yet Zhendi was able to ensure that we could live and work normally.

We had absolutely no idea though what enormous task Zhendi must have accomplished for his country that he would be granted such remarkable powers in return; that he would effectively be able to transform our lives with a clap of his hands. Later on, not long after Zhendi came back to save my life, people in the chemistry department started a rumour that Zhendi had played a key role in our nuclear weapons programme. They made a good story of it. When I heard what they were saying, I suddenly thought that it might very well be true, because the dates dovetailed nicely — China started its own nuclear weapons programme in 1964, not long before Zhendi left. What is more it would make sense: if you want to build a nuclear device you would definitely need mathematicians. The way I thought of it, that was the only kind of job that would be quite so secretive, quite so important, and would give him the kind of status that he so clearly had. But in the 1980s, the state published a list of the scientists who worked on the first and second generations of the Chinese nuclear weapons programme and Zhendi’s name wasn’t there. Maybe he changed his name, or maybe the whole thing was just a rumour in the first place. .

[To be continued]

4

Just like Master Rong, Zheng the Gimp played an important role in making it possible for me to write this book. I interviewed him long before I interviewed Master Rong, and we became good friends. At that time he was already more than sixty years old, and the loss of elasticity in his skin meant that the bones showed through clearly. Likewise, the problems with his gammy leg had only got worse with age — he could no longer conceal the problem by having a raised sole in one shoe; he was now reduced to walking with a stick. People said that he looked very grand, walking along leaning on his stick, but in fact I think that it was the man himself who was impressive and it was nothing at all to do with the stick. When I got to know him, he was the most important member of Unit 701 — the director of the whole place. Given his position, no one would dare call him Zheng the Gimp — even if he asked you to call him that you would not dare obey. Given his rank, given his age, there were a lot of ways to refer to him: ‘Director’; ‘Boss’; ‘Sir’.

Those were the kinds of terms of address that people used for him, all very respectful. The thing is that he often referred to himself as ‘the Crippled Director’. To tell you the truth, even now I don’t know his full name because there were too many other ways to refer to him, some vulgar, some respectful: his job title, cover-names, his code name — there were loads! It seemed like his real name was superfluous and apparently he hadn’t used it for ages — it almost seemed as though he had decided to get rid of it as unnecessary. Of course, given my position, I always used a respectful term of address for him. I called him ‘Director Zheng’.

Director Zheng.

Director Zheng. .

Let me tell you one of Director Zheng’s secrets — he had seven phone numbers. He had as many phone numbers as he had names! He gave me two of his numbers, which to be quite frank was more than enough — one was the number for his secretary and that phone was always answered immediately. Basically this meant that I could always let Director Zheng know that I wanted to talk to him, but he would not necessarily be able to pick up the phone and answer — that was very much a matter of luck.

After I had interviewed Master Rong, I rang both of the numbers that Director Zheng had given me. No one picked up on the first number and when I phoned the second, they told me to wait for a moment — that meant I was in luck that day. When Director Zheng came to the phone he asked me what I wanted. I told him that even today, people at the university thought that Rong Jinzhen had played a key role in building our first nuclear bomb. He asked me what on earth I was talking about. I said that I was talking about the fact that although Rong Jinzhen had achieved great things in the service of our country, because his work was secret, he was doomed to remain an unknown hero. However, it was because his work was secret that people imagined that he had done even greater things than were actually the case — he was being accorded a crucial role in our nuclear programme. I was interrupted at this stage by a bellow of rage down the phone line. ‘What on earth do you think you are talking about?’ he shouted. ‘Do you really think that you can win a war with nothing other than a nuclear weapon? With Rong Jinzhen we could have won pretty much any war we cared to fight! The nuclear programme was a way to show off our strength; like putting a flower in your hair to attract other people’s attention. What Rong Jinzhen was doing was to watch other people — he could hear the sound of other people’s heartbeat in the wind, he could see other people’s most treasured secrets. If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you will win every battle that you fight. That is why I tell you that from a military perspective, Rong Jinzhen’s work was of much more practical importance to us than any nuclear weapon.’

Rong Jinzhen was a cryptographer.

[Transcript of the interview with Director Zheng]

Cryptography involves one genius trying to work out what another genius has done — it is results in the most appalling carnage. To succeed in this mysterious and dangerous process, you call together the finest minds at your disposal. What you are trying to do is apparently very simple: you are trying to read the secrets hidden in a string of Arabic numerals. That sounds kind of fun, like a game; but this particular game has ruined the lives of many men and women of truly remarkable intelligence. . that’s the most impressive thing about cryptography.

It’s also the tragedy of cryptography. In the history of human endeavour, the majority of geniuses have been buried within the borders of cryptography. To put it another way: having destroyed one genius after another, having destroyed one generation of geniuses after another, all that we have left are the ciphers. They have brought so many great minds together — not to show what it is that they can do, but to make them suffer, to put them to death. No wonder people say that cryptography is the most heartbreaking profession in the world.[To be continued]

As Rong Jinzhen was bundled half-asleep into the car and driven away from the university at dawn on that summer’s day in 1956, he had no idea that the arrogant man sitting next to him would force him to spend the rest of his life working in the heartbreakingly difficult and secretive world of cryptography. He also did not know that his companion, whom his fellow students laughingly referred to as the gimp who had danced in the rain, was in fact a very important (if mysterious) individual, the head of the cryptography section of Special Unit 701. Or to put it another way, from here on in he was going to be Rong Jinzhen’s immediate superior. After the car had been driving for a while, the boss decided that he would like to talk to his new subordinate; but perhaps because of the sorrow of parting, he could not get a word out of him. The clear light of the car headlights shone into the darkness ahead of them and lit up the road; a strange and unlucky feeling enveloped them.

Just as dawn was breaking, the car drove out of the city limits and came out on National Highway XX. This alarmed Rong Jinzhen very much, and his head whipped from side to side. He thought, ‘Aren’t I supposed to be staying in the same city — the address was a local post-box, No. 36 — why are we going on a national highway?’ When Zheng the Gimp had taken him yesterday afternoon to complete the paperwork to do with his hiring, the car had turned again and again — not to mention the fact that for fully ten minutes they had insisted that he wear dark glasses so he could not see where they were going — but he could have sworn that at no time did they leave the city limits. Now the car was whizzing along the highway, he realized that they must be going somewhere very far away. Puzzled, he asked,‘Where are we going?’

‘To the Unit.’

‘Where is that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it far?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Aren’t we going to the same place as yesterday?’

‘Do you know where you went yesterday?’

‘I am sure it was somewhere in the city.’

‘You have already infringed the oath you swore. . ’

‘But. . ’

‘No buts. Repeat the first part of the oath you swore!’ ‘Everywhere I go, everything I see and hear is accounted classified information and I am not allowed to mention it to anyone.’ ‘In future you had better remember it! From here on in, every thing you see and hear is top secret. . ’

At nightfall, the car was still en route. Scattered lights could be seen in the distance, suggesting a medium-sized town. Rong Jinzhen was keeping his eyes peeled — he wanted to know where he was.

Zheng the Gimp demanded that he put dark glasses on. By the time he was allowed to take them off again, the car was moving along a mountain road with numerous hairpin bends. On both sides of the road there was forest and mountain scenery, but there was not a single road-sign or even any kind of marker to indicate where they were. There were many twists in this mountain road; it was narrow and pitch-black. The car headlights lit up the darkness — the beam of light seemed concentrated, fixed upon the road — as clear and bright as a searchlight. Sometimes he felt as though the car were not being propelled forward by its engine, but as if the light were pulling it along. They proceeded like this for about another hour. Far in the distance, Rong Jinzhen could see a couple of spots of light on the side of the dark mountain — that was their destination.

There was no sign on the gate. The man who opened the gate was missing one arm and sported a livid scar across his face, starting at his left ear and proceeding across the bridge of his nose, until it finally came to an end on his right cheekbone. When Rong Jinzhen caught sight of him, he was instantly reminded of the pirate stories he had read as a child. The surrounding buildings were completely silent, looming out of the darkness. This too reminded him of the medieval castles that figured so prominently in the foreign fairy stories he had read. Two people walked out of the gloom — they looked like ghosts.

As they came closer, it became apparent that one of them was a woman. She came over to shake hands with Zheng the Gimp, while the man got into the car and started lifting Rong Jinzhen’s luggage out.

Zheng the Gimp introduced Rong Jinzhen to the woman. In his scared and unhappy mood, Rong Jinzhen didn’t catch her name — he just heard that she was department head something-or-other and that she was the director here. Zheng the Gimp told him that this was Unit 701’s training base. All new comrades had to come here to receive political education and professional training when they joined Unit 701. He said, ‘When you have finished your basic training, I will send someone to collect you. I hope you will finish soon and become a fully-fledged member of Unit 701.’ When he had finished speaking he clambered back into the car and drove off. It was almost as if he were a human trafficker — having collected his wares in some other part of the country and delivered them to the purchaser, he now washed his hands of the whole situation without the slightest hesitation. One morning, some three months later, just as Rong Jinzhen was getting out of bed, he heard the sound of a motorbike pulling up outside his bedroom. A short time later he heard someone knocking on his door. Opening the door, he saw that a young man stood outside. The man said, ‘Section Chief Zheng sent me to come and collect you. You’d better get ready.’

The motorbike took him away, but it did not drive in the direction of the main gate. Instead it headed deeper into the complex, right into a mountain cave. There was in fact a huge cave complex there, spreading out in all directions; one opening out into the next, like a maze. The motorbike continued on and after about another ten minutes they stopped at a round-topped steel door. The driver got off the bike, went in and then came out again shortly afterwards; then they proceeded on the bike. After a further short space of time, the bike emerged on the far side of the underground complex and a series of buildings many times larger than the training centre unfurled before Rong Jinzhen’s eyes. This was where the mysterious and secretive Special Unit 701 was based, and this was where Rong Jinzhen would spend the rest of his life. His work would be conducted on the far side of the round-topped steel door that the motorbike had stopped next to just a few minutes before. The people here called this series of buildings the Northern Complex; the training centre was known as the Southern Complex. The Southern Complex was the gateway to the Northern Compex — not to mention being its checkpoint: there was something of the feel of a moated citadel accessible only by a single drawbridge to the whole thing. A person who did not pass the inspections at the Southern Complex would never be able to so much as gain a glimpse of the Northern Complex — that drawbridge was never going to be lowered for him.

The motorbike proceeded on its way, before finally coming to a halt in front of a redbrick building entirely covered in creepers. The delicious smell of cooking that came wafting out informed Rong Jinzhen that this must be a canteen. Zheng the Gimp happened to be eating inside and when he spotted Jinzhen through the window, he got up and came outside, still clutching a bun in his hand. He invited him in.

He still hadn’t had breakfast.

The dining hall was full of all sorts of people — there were both men and women; young and old. There were some people wearing military uniform, some in plain clothes; and there were even some wearing police uniform. During his time at the training centre, Rong Jinzhen had been trying to work out what kind of unit this was. How was it organized? Was it military or was it attached to the local government? Now, looking at the scene before him, he was completely confused. He thought to himself, ‘This must be one of the special features of a Special Unit. In fact, in any Special Unit, in any secret organization, there are naturally going to be many unusual features. Secrecy is at its very core. It is ever-present, like a note of music humming through the air.’

Zheng the Gimp took him through the main dining hall and into a separate room. The table there was already laid for breakfast. There was milk, eggs, stuffed buns, plain buns, and a number of little side dishes.

‘Sit down,’ said Zheng the Gimp.

Jinzhen sat down and started eating.

‘Look outside,’ said Zheng the Gimp. ‘They aren’t getting the kind of quality of food that you are eating; and they only have rice gruel to drink.’

Jinzhen raised his head and looked over. The people outside were all holding bowls, but he had been given a cup. There was milk in his cup.

‘Do you know why?’ asked Zheng the Gimp.

‘Is this some kind of special welcome?’

‘No. It is because your work is much more important than theirs.’ When he had finished breakfast, Rong Jinzhen began the work that he would devote the rest of his life to: cryptography. However, right up until that moment, he did not know that he was going to be assigned to this secret and heartbreaking profession. At the training centre, he had received unusual instruction — for example his teachers had required him to familiarize himself with the history, geography, foreign relations, holders of key government office, military might, military installations, defensive capabilities and so on of X country — he even had to read background material on a number of important government and military figures. This had made him very curious about what his future work was going to be. His first thought was that he was going to be researching some secret weapon that X country had developed for some special military objective. Later on he thought that maybe he would be joining some kind of PLA think-tank, say as a secretary to a senior military officer. After that, he thought that maybe he was supposed to become a military expert. After that, he thought of a number of other professions, all unpalatable in the extreme: a military instructor who would be sent overseas; a military attaché at an embassy; a spy, etc. He thought of all sorts of important and unusual professions that they could be intending for him, but he never even considered the possibility of becoming a cryptographer. That really isn’t a job, it is a conspiracy: a trap within a conspiracy.

5

To tell the truth, to begin with the people of Unit 701, then based in a mountain valley outside the suburbs of a certain city in China, did not realize quite what a great future Rong Jinzhen had ahead of him. Or at least you could say that they were not impressed by his work. He was engaged in lonely and difficult work — decrypting ciphers, for which in addition to training, experience and genius, you need a luck that comes from far beyond the stars. People in Unit 701 said it was perfectly possible to catch that luck that comes from far beyond the stars, but it requires that you raise your hands up high every morning and every evening at exactly the same time as black smoke comes curling out of your ancestors’ tombs.

When he first arrived, Rong Jinzhen did not understand this; or perhaps he simply did not care. But he spent the whole day reading a bunch of books that had nothing to do with anything — for example he would often have his nose in an English-language copy of the Complete Book of Mathematical Puzzles or a bunch of tatty old books stitched together with thread, their titles invisible. He seemed to fritter away each and every day in complete silence. He was obviously solitary (not snobbish or arrogant), but he did not say anything suggestive of particularly remarkable intelligence (in fact, he said very little to anyone), and he did not show signs of either great genius or great creative powers. People really did start to question his abilities and his luck. What was worse, no one was in any doubt as to his lack of interest in the work — as mentioned above, he was usually to be seen with his nose in a book totally unrelated to what he was supposed to be doing.

That was just the beginning. That was the first sign that he wasn’t working hard at his job, and the second was not far behind. One afternoon, Rong Jinzhen left the dining hall after lunch and, as was his wont, took a book and went for a walk in the woods. He didn’t have a siesta in the afternoons but he also didn’t do overtime — any spare time he had was usually spent reading in a quiet, out-of-the-way corner.

The north wing of the complex had been constructed on the mountain slopes. There were patches of natural woodland throughout the complex and he often went to one particular stretch of pine woods which was most conveniently located right by the main entrance to the caves where he worked. Apart from that, his other reason for selecting this particular woodland as his favourite walk was that he liked the particular piny smell of the trees, somewhat like medicated soap. Some people don’t like that resinous smell, but he enjoyed it. His love of this smell seemed closely related to his tobacco addiction, since after he took up walking regularly through the woods, he smoked a lot less.

That day, just as he walked into the wood, he heard the crunching sound of someone approaching. It was a man of about fifty. He seemed very modest and unassuming as he asked if he could play elephant chess, a sincere and ingratiating smile spreading across his face. Rong Jinzhen nodded his head and the other man happily whipped out a set and asked if he would like to play a game. Rong Jinzhen didn’t want to play — he wanted to read his book — but he felt bad saying so to the man’s face; it would have been rude to refuse, so he nodded again. Although it was now many years since he had last played, he had some experience of this game gained against Jan Liseiwicz — most people would not be able to beat him. This man wasn’t most people — the two men quickly realized that the other was a fine player in his own right and it would be very difficult for either of them to defeat the other. After that, the man often came to find him to play chess. He would come in the afternoon, he would come in the evening — sometimes he would even have the chess set waiting by the entrance to the cave or the door of the dining hall, to be sure of catching him when he went past. It was almost as if he was being stalked. This ensured that everyone knew he was playing chess with the lunatic.

Everyone in Unit 701 knew about the lunatic who liked to play chess. Before the Liberation, he had been an honours student at the mathematics department of Sun Yat-sen University, then after graduation he had been specially recruited by the KMT military and sent to Indo-China to work in their cryptography unit there. He had succeeded in cracking a high-level Japanese military cipher, making him famous in the world of cryptography. Later on, unhappy at Chiang Kai-shek’s decision to take the country into a second civil war, he managed to leave the military secretly and went to work as a foreman in a Shanghai electricity company under a different name. After the Liberation, Unit 701 went to a lot of trouble to find out what had happened to him; they invited him to come back. He had managed to crack a number of mid-level American ciphers, making him by far the most successful cryptographer they had. Two years ago, he had unfortunately developed schizophrenia — overnight he turned from a hero that everyone admired into a lunatic that they were all afraid of. If he saw someone he would curse at them, yelling and screaming; sometimes he would even hit people. Apparently this kind of acute schizophrenia, particularly when it is accompanied by a violent reaction on the part of the patient (what is commonly called paranoid schizophrenia), has a comparatively high rate of successful treatment. But because he knew too many important secrets, nobody dared to be the one that signed the order to send him to hospital. Instead, he was treated at the clinic attached to Unit 701. The doctors there were surgeons; they were quickly instructed in a handful of therapeutic methods by experts brought in from outside, and the whole thing did not go at all well. They managed to get him calmed down, but it all went far too far — other than his obsession with playing chess, he did not seem to think about anything else at all. In fact, he could not think about anything else. He had gone from being a paranoid schizophrenic to being a catatonic schizophrenic.

In actual fact, he did not know how to play elephant chess until he got sick, but by the time he left hospital he had become a very fine player. He had learned the game from one of the doctors. According to what the experts said later on, the whole problem developed as a result of the fact that the doctor taught him to play elephant chess at too early a stage in his recovery. As the expert said, when someone is starving, you can’t give them a full meal straight away. In this kind of case, when the patient begins his recovery you do not want him to concentrate his intelligence upon one object — if that happens, it may well be the case that later he finds it impossible to detach his concentration from that object. Of course, there is no reason why a surgeon should know anything about the treatment of psychological problems; what is more he was a fan of elephant chess and often played the game with his patients. One day, when he realized that the schizophrenic seemed to be able to understand the movements of the pieces on the board, he thought that this was a sign that he was beginning to recover, so he started playing the game with him too. He thought that this was consolidating the man’s recovery, but in fact it all ended in disaster; he turned a great cryptographer, who might well have made a full recovery from his breakdown, into a chessplaying lunatic.

In a nutshell, this was a failure of medical care at Unit 701, but what choice did they have? As it is, people have to muddle through life — if things go well it is because you are lucky; if things go badly who are you going to blame? You can’t blame anyone. If you want to find something to blame here, then blame the wretched man’s job; blame the fact that he knew too many secrets. It was the fact that he knew so much top-secret information that decreed that he would spend the rest of his life confined in this mountain valley, crippled in mind. People said that when he played elephant chess, you could still see how clever he must have been before he got so sick, but the rest of the time his IQ was about the same level as that of a dog. If you shouted at him he would run away; if you smiled at him he would obediently obey your commands. Because he had nothing to do, he would wander around inside Unit 701 all day every day, like a poor little lost soul.Now this lost soul had found Rong Jinzhen.

Rong Jinzhen didn’t try and make him go away, like other people did.

It was very easy to get him to leave you alone: all you had to do was shout at him sternly a couple of times. Rong Jinzhen did not do that; he didn’t avoid him, he didn’t shout at him, he didn’t even glare at him. He treated him just the same as he treated everyone else — neither warm nor cold; quite simply as if he really didn’t care. Because of this the lunatic kept on coming to find him, he wouldn’t leave him alone; he wanted him to play another game of chess.

Another game of chess!

And another game of chess!

People were not sure if Rong Jinzhen felt sorry for the lunatic and that is why they played chess together, or whether it was because he admired the other man’s skill. Which it was did not really matter — the point is that a cryptographer does not have time to play chess. The fact is that the lunatic got that way in the first place because he became too obsessed with his ciphers — they drove him mad in the same way that a balloon that you carry on pumping air into will eventually explode. When people saw Rong Jinzhen wasting time playing chess when he should have been concentrating on his cryptography, they decided that either he really didn’t want to do this kind of work, or he was another lunatic, who imagined that he would decrypt all the ciphers in the world by moving his pieces across the board.

Was it that he didn’t want to do the work, or that he couldn’t? Very soon, they would get what seemed to be cast-iron proof that Rong Jinzhen was in the former category. It came in the form of a letter from Jan Liseiwicz.

6

Seven years earlier, when Professor Jan Liseiwicz scooped up his family and relatives by marriage and took them to X country to live, he certainly had no idea that one day he would have to bring these bloody people back again. The fact is, he had no choice: bargaining his way out was not an option. Originally, his mother-in-law had been a very healthy woman, but thanks to her transplantation to an entirely alien country and an ever-growing homesickness, her health was quickly undermined. When she realized that she might very well be facing the prospect of dying far from home, she demanded with as much force as ever an old Chinese person did to go home to die.

Where was home?

In China!

Half the guns in X country were trained against China! As you will have gathered, it was not going to be easy to satisfy his mother-in-law’s demands. In fact, it was so difficult that Jan Liseiwicz simply refused to even consider the idea. However, his father-in-law revealed a thuggish streak in his character — belied by his family’s respectable reputation — by putting a knife against his neck and threatening to commit suicide. It was at that moment that Liseiwicz realized that he was caught in a horrible trap; he had no choice but to obey the old brute’s demands. It was also perfectly clear that the reason his father-in-law proceeded to this extreme — where he was prepared to risk his own life — was because his wife’s demands now were exactly the same as those he was planning to make one day. The knife that he put to his neck was there to tell his son-in-law that if it turned out that survival meant that he was doomed to die abroad, he would rather kill himself immediately so he could be buried with his wife back in China!

To tell the truth, Jan Liseiwicz found it very difficult to understand this old Chinese gentleman’s strange determination, but the fact that he did not understand did not matter in the least. When the knife was at the neck and a scene of carnage looked likely to unfold at any moment, what does it matter whether you understand or not? You have no choice but to do what he wants; if you don’t understand it you still have to do it; if you find it horrible you still have to do it; and what is more, you have to do it in person. Given the constant barrage of exaggerated propaganda that they were all living under, his family (including his wife) were very worried that he would not be able to come back alive. Nevertheless, that spring Jan Liseiwicz took his failing mother-in-law back to her old home town by plane, train, and finally by car.

The story goes that when his old mother-in-law was lifted into the car that had been hired to take her to her home town, she opened her eyes wide when she heard the driver speak in familiar accents, then she peacefully closed her eyes forever. What does it mean when they say that a life is hanging by a thread? That is a life hanging by a thread. The voice of the driver speaking in the dialect of her home town was like a knife. The knife descended and the thread that was her life blew away in the wind.

On his journey, Jan Liseiwicz had to travel through C City. That did not mean that he was able to visit N University. He was under strict restrictions the whole way — I do not know if these restrictions were imposed by the Chinese or by X country, but either way he was followed everywhere by two minders: one was Chinese and the other came from X country. The trio seemed to be roped together — they dragged him along between them. Where he went and how fast he got there was entirely up to them — it was as if he were a robot, or perhaps some kind of national treasure. The fact is that he was only a mathematician, or at least that is what it said in his passport. These conditions were, to hear Master Rong tell it, imposed by the historical circumstances. .[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

You know what the relationship between our country and X was like in those days: there was no good faith to speak of — we were enemies. The slightest movement on either side was treated as evidence of aggressive intent. I could never have imagined that Jan Liseiwicz would be able to come back, let alone that he would arrive at C City only to discover that he would not be allowed anywhere near N University. That meant that I had to go and see him at his hotel. When we met, I might as well have been visiting a criminal in his prison cell — the two of us were sitting there talking and we each had two further people, one on either side of us, listening and making a recording of everything we said — each sentence had to be enunciated clearly so that all four of them could hear. Thank goodness all four of them were completely bilingual or it would have been impossible for us to so much as open our mouths — we would immediately have been condemned as spies or secret agents; anything we said would have been taken as intelligence. It was a very special time — in those days when Chinese people met anyone from X country they were not treated as other human beings: they were devils, our most hated enemies — the least little thing could be evidence of evil intent, shooting out venom, sending the other to their deaths.

In actual fact, Jan Liseiwicz didn’t want to see me, but Zhendi. As you know, by that time Zhendi had left N University to go who knows where. I couldn’t see him, let alone Professor Liseiwicz. When he found this out, Liseiwicz decided that he wanted to see me; I had no doubt that this was because he was hoping to get information about what had happened to Zhendi. When I had received permission from my guards, I told him what I could about what had happened to Zhendi. It was very simple and obvious: he had stopped working on artificial intelligence and had gone on to do something else. I was surprised by Liseiwicz’s reaction to my words — he looked completely horrified. To begin with he clearly couldn’t think of anything to say, then after a long silence he spat out one word: ‘Appalling!’ He was so angry that his face went bright red; he simply could not sit still in his seat. He started pacing up and down the room, going on and on about how remarkable the results of Zhendi’s research into artificial intelligence had been and how he would achieve even greater breakthroughs if he were allowed to continue.

He said, ‘I have seen a couple of the papers that he co-authored. I can tell you that in this field, they are already achieving internationalstandard research. To give the whole thing up midway. . how dreadful!’

‘Sometimes things don’t work out the way that one might wish. . ‘ ‘Was Jinzhen recruited by a government unit?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘To do what?’

‘I don’t know.’

He kept on asking, and I kept on saying that I didn’t know. In theend he said, ‘If my guess is right, Jinzhen is working for a top-secret unit now?’

I just repeated what I had already said: ‘I don’t know.’ It was true — I didn’t know.

The fact is that even today I don’t know what unit Zhendi was working for, where he was, or what he was doing. Maybe you know, but I am not expecting you to tell me. To my mind, that is Zhendi’s secret, but above and beyond that, it is our country’s secret. Every country, every army has its own secrets: secret organizations, secret weapons, secret agents, secret. . too many to name. How could a country survive without its secrets? Maybe it couldn’t. Like an iceberg, if it didn’t have the part that is hidden under the water, how would it be able to survive?

Sometimes I think that it is very unfair to ask someone to keep something secret from his own closest relatives for decades — or maybe even for his whole lifetime. But if it were not like that, maybe your country wouldn’t survive, or at the very least would be in serious danger. That would also be unfair. The one seems to me to outweigh the other. I have thought this way for many years. It is only by thinking in this way that I feel I can understand the decisions that Zhendi made. Otherwise, my life with Zhendi would seem to have been a dream, a daydream, a waking dream, a dream within a dream, a long and strange dream that even he, who was so good at interpreting what other people saw in the still watches of the night, would have difficulty in understanding. .

[The end]

During his meeting with Master Rong, Jan Liseiwicz repeated over and over again that she should tell Zhendi that if it were at all possible he should ignore all other temptations and come back to continue his work on artificial intelligence. After they said goodbye, Liseiwicz watched Master Rong walking away. Suddenly he decided to write to Jinzhen himself. He realized that he had no way of getting in touch with Jinzhen, so he shouted to Master Rong and asked for his address. Master Rong asked her companion whether she could tell him or not, and the latter indicated that she could, so she told him what it was. That evening, Liseiwicz wrote a short letter to Jinzhen. Having showed it first to his own guard and then to the Chinese one and received permission from both of them to send it, he dropped it in the letter-box.

The letter arrived at Unit 701 according to the normal route. As to whether Jinzhen would be allowed to read it or not, that would depend entirely upon the contents. Given that this was a top-secret unit, the Party inspected even personal mail — that was just one of the many ways in which this unit was special. Anyway, when the people in the surveillance team opened Liseiwicz’s letter, they were initially completely baffled because the letter was written in English. That was quite enough to put them on guard and make them take this missive very seriously. It was immediately reported to the head of the team, who demanded a translation from the relevant authorities.

The original text covered an entire sheet of paper but when it was translated into Chinese, it worked out as just a couple of lines. The text ran as follows:

Dear Jinzhen,

I have returned to China at my mother-in-law’s behest and so at the moment I am staying at the provincial capital. I have been told that you have left the university and are now engaged in some other kind of work. I don’t know what it is that you are doing, but from the level of secrecy surrounding it (including the address that I have been given) I am sure that you are engaged in important work for some top-secret unit, just as I was some twenty years ago. Out of sympathy and love for my people, I made a terrible mistake twenty years ago and accepted a mission entrusted to me by a particular country [given that Liseiwicz was Jewish, this must probably refer to the state of Israel]. That mission can be said to have ruined my life. Given my own experience and my knowledge of you, I am very worried about your present situation. Your intelligence is extremely acute, but it is also fragile; it would be disastrous for you to be placed in circumstances where you are subject to external pressure and control. You have already achieved deeply impressive results in your researches into artificial intelligence; if you carry on, I am sure that great fame and glory awaits you! You should not let yourself be diverted into another path. If at all possible, I hope that you will listen to my advice and go back to your original work!

Jan Liseiwicz

13 March 1957

The Friendship Hotel at the provincial capital

It was very clear that the contents of this letter were related to the way in which Rong Jinzhen had reacted to being recruited for Unit 701. Right then, people (at least the relevant project directors) had no difficulty at all in understanding why Rong Jinzhen seemed to be so work-shy; there was someone telling him to go back to his original field. The foreign professor, Jan Liseiwicz!

7

As it turned out, due to the ‘unhealthy contents’ of this letter, Rong Jinzhen was not allowed to read it. There was a rule in Unit 701: don’t ask forbidden questions, don’t discuss forbidden topics, don’t try and find out about forbidden things. As far as the Party was concerned, the fewer letters of that type that turned up the better — it just caused trouble. The Party was having to keep far too many things secret from its own people already.

As it turned out, this simple method of trying to get rid of the problem didn’t work where Rong Jinzhen was concerned. A month later the surveillance team received another letter for him. This time it had come all the way from X country. X country — how sensitive was that! When they opened it up, it was written in English. Looking at the signature, it was another missive from Jan Liseiwicz. This letter was much longer than the first one. Yet again, Liseiwicz was trying to persuade Jinzhen to go back to his original research, and expressed even greater regret that he had given it up midway. He began the letter by discussing various articles he had read in mathematics journals concerning the most recent advances in research into artificial intelligence, but then (as if turning to the main subject of the communication) he said:

It was a dream that decided me to write this letter to you. To tell you the truth, the last couple of days I have been wondering what you are doing now and what reward you were offered (or what pressure you were placed under) that resulted in you making such a startling decision. Last night, you appeared in my dreams to tell me that you were working for a top-secret unit in your country and that you have become a cryptographer. I do not know why I have had this dream; I have neither the knowledge nor the experience to be able to interpret what I experience in my dreams and relate it to real events — maybe it was just a dream and does not mean anything at all. I hope that is all it was; just a dream! However, I believe that this dream represents my hopes and fears for you — I am worried that your genius has attracted the wrong kind of attention and they are going to force you into this kind of work. Whatever happens you must not agree. Why do I say that? There are two reasons:

I. The NaTure of CrypTography Nowadays many mathematicians are involved in the world of cryptography and so some people have begun to claim that it is a science in its own right; as a result many people have been attracted into the field and some of them have even ended up sacrificing their lives. Nothing that they have done has succeeded in changing my opinion of ciphers; in my experience, regardless of whether you are talking about the construction of ciphers or their decryption, they are fundamentally anti-scientific, anti-intellectual; they are a poison that mankind has developed to destroy science and a conspiracy against the people that work with them. You need intelligence to work in cryptography, but it is a devilish intelligence; every success that you achieve in this field forces other people to become more inventively evil, more fiercely cunning. Ciphers are a kind of concealed warfare, but it is pointless to win this kind of battle, because it achieves nothing.

II. your CharaCTer

As I have said before, you have a very acute but also fragile intelligence, as well as an obsessive character — these are the classic signs of an excellent scientist, but they also mean that you are fundamentally unsuited to cryptography. Top-secret work involves a lot of pressure; it means that you have to subordinate your own personality and demands to that of your work — do you think you can do that? I am quite sure that you can’t, because you are at once too fragile and too stubborn — you are simply not resilient enough. If you are not very careful, this work will break you! You ought to know for yourself under what circumstances people develop their ideas. It is when they are relaxed, when they are free to let their thoughts roam, when no demands are placed upon them. But from the moment you first take up cryptography, you are heavily circumscribed; your actions are controlled on all sides in the interests of national security — you are under pressure. It is crucial here to think about what your country is. I often ask myself, what is my country? Is it Poland? Is it Israel? Is it England? Is it Switzerland? Is it China? Or is it X?

Now I have finally come to understand that when people talk about ‘their country’ they mean their relatives, their friends, their language, the bridge they cross when they go to work, the little stream that runs past their house, the woods, the paths, the gentle wind blowing from the west, the chirping of the cicadas, the fireflies at night, and so on and so forth — not a particular piece of land confined within set borders, nor the object of a nationalist party or demagogue’s veneration. To tell you the truth, I have a great deal of respect for the country in which you are living, because I spent the happiest years of my life there. I can speak Chinese; I have many family and friends there, including some now sadly dead. Thanks to my family and friends there — living and dead — I have a host of memories that are inextricably linked with that country. In many ways you could say that your country — China — is also my country, but that doesn’t mean that I want to deceive myself, nor that I want to lie you. If I didn’t say these things to you, if I didn’t point out the constraints of your present position and the dangers that you will have to face, then I would indeed be lying to you. .

It seems as though Liseiwicz felt with this letter that he had burned his boats, because less than a month later, a third letter arrived. This time he was very angry and he complained vociferously because Jinzhen had not written back. He clearly had his own opinion about why not –

If you don’t reply, it means that you are involved in this work — decrypting ciphers!

His reasoning was simple enough to understand: silence = agreement = admission.

Afterwards, trying hard to control his emotions, he went into considerable detail about his reasoning. This is what he said:

I do not know why, but every time I think about you, I feel as though my heart is being run through a wringer — I feel completely helpless. Everyone has some regrets in their life; maybe you are mine. Jinzhen, dear Jinzhen, what has happened to make me so worried about you? Please tell me that you are not involved in cryptography — I have been so worried that it is giving me nightmares. With your genius, with the research subjects that you have picked, with your long silence — I am more and more worried that my dream is correct. Ciphers are accursed things! They are very sensitive, they take the people that touch them and enfold them in a close embrace — it is a prison sentence; they might as well drop you at the bottom of a dark pit and forget about you! Dear Jinzhen, if this is true, then you must listen to me; if you have an opportunity to go back, take it! If you are offered even the slightest chance, do not hesitate: take it! If you have no opportunity to go back, then you must remember the following advice. You can work on any cipher they need you to decrypt, but you must never, ever work on PURPLE!

PURPLE was the most difficult cipher that Unit 701 had ever been charged with breaking. Rumour had it that some religious organization had spent a lot of money (not to mention resorting to gangster methods) to cajole and threaten a mathematician into creating this cipher for them. After he had developed it, because it involved so many procedural steps, because it was so difficult, because there were further internal ciphers contained within the main encryption method, because it was so damn complicated, because it was so mysterious and arcane, the new owners had no idea how to use it, so in the end they sold it to X country. At the moment, it was the highest level cipher used by the military in X country and hence of course it was also the cipher that Unit 701 most wanted to decrypt. For the last couple of years, the geniuses in Unit 701’s cryptography division had been wracking their brains over it; they had worked so hard, suffered so much, thought about it day and night, waking and sleeping; apparently the only result was that people were getting more and more scared to even touch it. The fact is that the lunatic went mad as a result of working on PURPLE. Or to put it another way, the lunatic was driven mad by the anonymous mathematician who originally developed PURPLE. Those who had escaped this fate had done so not because they were so much mentally stronger, but because they were too cowardly — or maybe that should be too clever — to even touch PURPLE. They were clever enough to know what the result would be of beginning to work on it, so you could say that refusing to even touch it was a sign of their good sense. This was a trap, a black hole; anyone sensible would avoid it like the plague. The only person foolhardy enough to give it a go had been driven mad and that made people even more cautious, even more determined to give it a wide berth. Given what Unit 701 had already been through to try and decrypt PURPLE, they were at one and the same time both desperate to crack it and completely incapable of doing so.

Now here was Jan Liseiwicz specifically warning Rong Jinzhen not to touch PURPLE. On the one hand that demonstrated that PURPLE would indeed be very difficult to decrypt and that if he tried, he would not get anything out of it; but on the other hand it also made it clear that Liseiwicz must know something about how PURPLE worked. From the letters that he had sent to date, it was clear that he and Jinzhen were unusually close. If they were able to make use of that affection, they might find a way to make him disgorge some useful information. So a letter was sent back to Jan Liseiwicz, signed with Jinzhen’s name.

The letter was typed; only the signature at the bottom was handwritten. It looked like Rong Jinzhen’s signature, but it was forged. To put it bluntly — at least in this matter, Rong Jinzhen was being used by the Party. The aim of writing back to Liseiwicz was to help with the decryption of PURPLE — why did they have to let Jinzhen know what was going on when he spent all day reading his novels and playing chess with a lunatic rather than getting on with his work? Besides which, if they had let him write the letter himself, he would not necessarily have come up with anything as good as what they did — the first draft was prepared by five experts and it was approved by three of the directors before it was sent. The burden of the message, couched in the most sincere and respectful terms was simple: ‘Why can’t I decrypt PURPLE?’

Apparently all this sincerity and respect had its effect since Liseiwicz wrote back extremely quickly; a letter filled with sincere advice. He began by bewailing the fact that his dream was correct and upbraiding Jinzhen for being so stupid as to take this path. He seemed to see it as a sign of the unfairness of fate. After that, he went on to write:

I feel an irresistible impulse to tell you my secret — I really don’t understand why. Maybe when I have written this letter and posted it, I will regret what I have done. I swore an oath that I would never tell anyone this secret, but for your sake, I have to speak. .

What secret?

In the letter, Liseiwicz explained that in the winter of the year that he brought the two packing-cases of books back to the university, he was originally planning to start work researching artificial intelligence. However, the following spring, an important personage in the newly established state of Israel came to visit him. This person said, ‘It has long been the dream of all Jewish people to have our own homeland. However, we are now faced with enormous problems. Are you prepared to see your own people suffer any more than they have already?’

Liseiwicz replied, ‘Of course not.’

‘Then I hope that you are going to do something for us,’ his visitor said.

‘What?’

Liseiwicz explained in his letter: ‘They wanted me, on behalf of the Israeli government, to decrypt a couple of the military ciphers in use among neighbouring countries. I did this kind of work for the next couple of years.’ That must have been what Liseiwicz was referring to in the letter he left for Young Lillie when he and his family departed for X country: ‘The last few years I have been working on something very important on their behalf — the troubles that they have faced and their hopes for the future have moved me deeply; for their sake I have given up a long cherished ambition.’ Liseiwicz went on to write: ‘I was very lucky. After they began employing me in this work, I was able to decrypt quite a few mid-level and a couple of high-level ciphers being used by neighbouring countries without too many problems. Pretty quickly I was just as famous in the world of cryptography as I had ever been in the world of mathematics.’

That made what happened next so much clearer. It explained why X country was so determined to help him at all costs, why they took him and his family away — it was because they were hoping to be able to make use of his cryptographic abilities. But after he arrived in X country, things had worked out completely differently from anything Liseiwicz could have imagined. As he wrote:

I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined that they wanted me to come not because they were hoping that I would be able to decrypt enemy ciphers but because they wanted me to decrypt one of their own: PURPLE! I am sure that I do not need to tell you that the moment I can decrypt it — maybe even the moment I get close — it is going to be rendered obsolete. My job is to decide whether PURPLE lives or dies. I am effectively a signal, informing X country of when the enemy is likely to have got close to cracking PURPLE. Maybe I ought to feel proud of this; they clearly think that if I can’t decrypt PURPLE then no one can. I don’t know why; maybe it is because I don’t like the role in which I have been cast, maybe it is because I don’t like people claiming that PURPLE can never be broken — anyway, for whatever reason I have become particularly determined to decrypt it. But up to the present moment I have not even begun to feel my way towards a method for doing so — that is why I am telling you not to even think about touching PURPLE yourself. .

The people reading this missive noticed a couple of striking things about it — the handwriting and sender’s address were completely different from previous letters, which means that Liseiwicz was well aware of how dangerous his actions were — in sending this letter he could easily have been accused of treason. It also demonstrated how genuinely fond of Jinzhen he was. It seemed entirely possible that this affection could be used and so another letter signed with Jinzhen’s name was sent to Liseiwicz in X country. In this letter, the false Jinzhen was clearly trying to use the professor’s fondness for his former student to force him into making some kind of disclosure:

I have lost my freedom. If I wish to recover it, I have to decrypt PURPLE. . I am sure that after working on PURPLE all these years you can offer me a few pointers to guide me through the maze. . I have no experience in this kind of work, I need advice; any advice would be useful. . Dear Professor Liseiwicz, curse me if you like, spit at me, hit me, I feel like a Judas. .

It was of course impossible to post a letter with this kind of content straight to Jan Liseiwicz. In the end it was decided to send it first to some of our comrades in X country, who would arrange for it to be privately delivered. Even though they could be quite sure that it would arrive safely; as to whether or not Liseiwicz would reply, the people at Unit 701 were far from feeling confident. After all, this Jinzhen — the false Jinzhen — really was a Judas; most professors would not pay the blindest bit of attention to a student like that. To put it another way, this false Jinzhen was nicely poised between being pitiful and being despicable. Getting someone like Liseiwicz to ignore the despicable features and concentrate on the pitiable ones was going to be quite as difficult as cracking PURPLE. Sending this letter really was just trying their luck; it tells you that the cryptography division at Unit 701 was so desperate at this point that they would try anything.

Well, the miracle happened and Liseiwicz wrote back! During the next six months, Liseiwicz repeatedly risked a traitor’s death to contact our comrades, giving ‘dear Jinzhen’ a mass of material about PURPLE and suggesting ways to proceed in decrypting it. As a result, headquarters decided to temporarily create a PURPLE decryption working group, providing the majority of the cryptographers themselves. They were told to crack this difficult nut as quickly as they could. No one had any idea that Rong Jinzhen would be ahead of them all! In actual fact, by this time Liseiwicz had been patiently writing to Jinzhen for the best part of a year, without Rong Jinzhen having received a single letter — he didn’t even know the first thing about what was going on. That means that these letters meant nothing to him — if they affected him at all, it was by lifting the pressure a little bit. After all, when the directors realized that Jinzhen wasn’t working hard at his ciphers (in fact if anything he was even worse than before) they could easily have got rid of him as a complete waste of space — but the fact is that the Party decided to leave him alone. They did not need his input. He was going to be the bait that would allow them to decrypt PURPLE.

When people said that he was even worse than before, they were complaining about the fact that he was wasting more and more of his time in playing chess and reading novels; later on he also got into trouble for interpreting people’s dreams. Once they realized that he could interpret dreams, he attracted a horde of curious people, tracking him down so that they could tell him about the weird things that had popped into their heads overnight and wanting to know what it all meant. As with playing chess, Rong Jinzhen really didn’t know very much about the subject, but he found it difficult to say no to people’s faces. Maybe it is simply that he did not have the savoir faire to be able to turn them down politely. Anyway, he had no choice but to agree. He would take their tangled night-time thoughts and straighten them out into something that seemed to make good sense.

Every Thursday afternoon there was a political meeting for all the people working at Unit 701. They did different things at this meeting: sometimes a new policy would be explained, sometimes there would be a reading from the newspapers, sometimes there would be free discussion. When it was the latter, people would often drag Rong Jinzhen off into a corner and get him to interpret their dreams. There was one time where just as he was in the middle of explaining someone’s dream, he happened to come to the attention of the deputy division chief (one of the cadres in charge of raising political awareness) who was overseeing this particular meeting. This deputy division chief was very left-wing, and liked making a mountain out of a molehill — he was the sort of person that always leaps to the very worst conclusions. He decided that what Rong Jinzhen was doing was feudal superstition. Jinzhen was criticized in pretty severe terms and told to write a self-criticism.

The deputy division chief did not have many friends among his subordinates. The people in the cryptography division loathed him and so they all told Rong Jinzhen not to pay any attention to the man — just write a couple of lines and draw a line under the whole thing. Rong Jinzhen tried to follow this advice but his idea of how to draw a line under the whole thing and anyone else’s really did not coincide. When he handed in his self-criticism, it consisted of just one line: ‘All the secrets in the world are hidden in dreams and that includes ciphers.’

This is not the kind of thing that gets you out of trouble. He was clearly trying to prevaricate, as if interpreting other people’s dreams were in some way related to cryptography. There was even an arrogant overtone to the statement, suggesting that he was the only person who understood this crucial point. Even though the deputy division chief understood nothing about cryptography, he found the idea that something as individualistic as a dream could be allowed to go unchecked profoundly disgusting. He looked at the self-criticism and felt as though each word were pulling faces at him, sneering at him, humiliating him, running wild, throwing stones. . how could this possibly be acceptable? He was not going to stand for this! Jumping up, he grabbed hold of the self-criticism and rushed furiously out of his office. Leaping onto the back of a motorbike, he drove straight for the mountain cave. He kicked open the steel door to the cryptography division and right there in front of everyone he swore at Rong Jinzhen, using the tone of voice of a much-tried superior. Pointing at Jinzhen, he fired off his final shot: ‘You have expressed your opinion; now let me tell you mine: every ugly toad thinks that sooner or later he is going to get to eat the meat of a swan!’

The deputy division chief had no idea that he would have to pay a horrible price for what he said on this occasion; in fact, he ended up being so humiliated over it that he had to leave Unit 701. The fact is that while the deputy division chief was maybe a little hasty, it was the kind of thing that everyone in the cryptography unit was also saying — they found nothing wrong with it at the time; in fact, as far as they could see he had it absolutely right. As I have said before, in order to succeed in this solitary, difficult and dangerous profession, quite apart from great intelligence and the necessary knowledge and experience, you also need a luck that comes from far beyond the stars. The impression that Rong Jinzhen had given everybody was that he simply did not have the natural intelligence required. Furthermore, he had shown no signs of being either lucky or of creating his own luck. It seemed more than likely that the deputy section chief was right.

There is a proverb in China which these people should have remembered: ‘You cannot measure the ocean with a ladle; you cannot tell what someone can do just by looking at him.’

Of course, the ultimate reply to his detractors was that one year later Rong Jinzhen cracked PURPLE.

One year!

He decrypted PURPLE!

Who would have guessed that at a time when everyone was avoiding PURPLE like the plague, this so-called ugly toad was just squaring up to the task! If anyone had realized what he was up to, they would have laughed at him. Sometimes people say that the ignorant are fearless. Well in this case, as it turned out, the facts demonstrated that this particular ugly toad was not only a genius, he also had the luck of one. He had the luck that comes from far beyond the stars. He had the luck that you see when you raise your hands at exactly the same moment as smoke appears above your ancestors’ graves.

Rong Jinzhen’s luck was unbelievable. You cannot ask for that kind of thing. Some people said that he decrypted PURPLE in his sleep — or perhaps it was as a result of interpreting someone else’s dream. Some people said that he found inspiration in the chess games that he played with the lunatic. Some people said that he got the key to the whole thing when reading one of his novels. Whatever the truth of the matter, it seemed as though he had managed to decrypt PURPLE with hardly any effort — that really amazed people, as well as making them jealous and excited! Everyone was excited. Jealousy was left to the experts who had been sent by headquarters. They really thought that with the pointers Liseiwicz was sending them, they would be the ones who would be lucky enough to decrypt PURPLE.

This was the winter of 1957. Rong Jinzhen had spent just over a year at Unit 701.

8

Twenty-five years later, the crippled director of Unit 701 sat in the middle of his very plainly appointed living room and told me that when everyone else was using a ladle to measure the potential of Rong Jinzhen’s sea, he was one of the few people who still held out any hope that he might ever achieve something. To hear him tell it, no one else at that time really understood Jinzhen in the slightest. I don’t know whether this is all hindsight, or whether the thing really did happen the way that he said. All I can tell you is what he told me:

[Transcript of the interview with Director Zheng]

To tell the truth, I have spent my entire life working in cryptography and I have never seen anyone with such a remarkable sixth sense where ciphers were concerned as [Rong Jinzhen] had. He seemed to find a kind of connection with the ciphers he worked on, an umbilical connection such as you see between a mother and baby — whereby a great deal of information seemed to pass directly between them, through the blood as it were. That was one impressive thing about the way he approached a cipher. The other impressive thing was his remarkable powers of concentration and his cold and calm intelligence — the more other people gave the thing up as hopeless, the more determined he was to push it. He really didn’t care what other people thought about him. His creative abilities were fully the equal of his intelligence — they were a key part of his personality. In both cases they were easily double that of an ordinary person. When you discovered just how magnificent his quiet achievements were, it was inspirational; but also made you realize how puny and incapable you were in comparison.

I remember particularly, not long after he had joined the cryptography division I went to Y country to participate in a three-month professional assignment — it was also to do with PURPLE. At that time Y country was also working on decrypting PURPLE and they had got a lot further with it than we had — headquarters decided to send us there specially to see what we could learn. Three people were selected to go, me and one of the cryptographers from my section, plus a deputy division chief from headquarters — the man who oversaw our work on behalf of the central authorities.

When I got back I heard a lot of complaints about Jinzhen from the directors of our division and my co-workers; they said that he wasn’t concentrating on his work, that he wasn’t really getting into the spirit of the thing, that he didn’t make demands of himself, and so on. I was very upset to hear this, of course, because it was I who had brought him here — I was supposed to be bringing back an expert and apparently all I had managed to recruit was a clown. The following evening I went to his rooms to find him. The door was ajar. I knocked and there was no answer, so I went in. There was no one in the main room, so I went through to the bedroom. I could see that he was curled up on the bed fast asleep. I coughed and walked into the bedroom, switching on the light. When it clicked on, I was amazed to discover that the walls were plastered with diagrams. Some were like logarithmic tables, covered with lines twisting and turning across each sheet of paper; others were more like trigonometric tables, and their numbers, written in all the colours of the rainbow, seemed to quiver like soap bubbles caught in a beam of light. The whole room seemed as magical as a castle in the air.

When I looked at the annotations he had made to each of the diagrams, I immediately understood that he had rewritten the History of Cryptography in a more concise form — if it hadn’t been for those notes, I simply wouldn’t have understood what it was all about. The History of Cryptography was this massive fat book — three million Chinese characters — and he had managed to condense it down to these simple annotations using just a few lines of numbers — that really did impress me very much. To be able to look at a body and see the bones beneath the skin, to represent them exactly upon paper — that is the work of a genius. But he didn’t even need the skeleton — he had just taken a single finger bone away! Just think about it: think what it means to be able to recreate the whole living organism if all you have is one finger bone!

The fact is that Rong Jinzhen was a genius — there were many things about him that an ordinary person simply could not understand. He could go for months, maybe as long as a year, without saying a word to anyone — it really didn’t seem to bother him — but when he did finally open his mouth, he would say something that quite possibly was more important than everything you have said in your entire life put together. Whatever he did, it seemed as though he did not care about the process at all, the only thing that mattered was the result. The results of what he did were always perfect — it was amazing! He seemed to have an uncanny ability to get to the crux of the matter, but the way that he went about it was unique, peculiar; something that you would never have thought of in a million years. To put the History of Cryptography up in his own room — who would have thought it? Nobody else behaved like that. Let me make a comparison. If we say that a cipher is like a mountain and that decrypting that cipher is like finding the secret hidden in the mountain, then the first thing that most people would do would be to find a way to climb the mountain and when they got to the top, they would start looking for the secret. He wouldn’t do anything of the kind. He would go and climb a completely different mountain and then when he got to the top, he would fire up a searchlight and start looking for that mountain’s secret using a telescope. He was a very strange person, with truly remarkable gifts.

There can be no doubt that when he decided to move the History of Cryptography into his room in this strange way, he was ensuring that his every move, waking and sleeping, was in some way linked with decryption — you can imagine that each cipher recorded in that book seemed to be breathed into his lungs like oxygen, passing through his blood until it reached his very heart. .

. . The first shock I got was from what I saw. However, I immediately received a second shock from what he said to me.

I asked him why he was wasting his time with history. In my opinion, cryptographers are not historians; for a cryptographer to get involved in the history of the subject is stupidly dangerous. Do you know what he said?

He said, ‘I think all ciphers are like living organisms — because they are alive, there is an invisible connection between the ciphers in use in history and those that we use today; furthermore, all the ciphers developed at the same period in time have an intimate relationship. Whatever the cipher is that we want to decrypt now, the answer may well be hidden in an earlier one.’

‘When people create ciphers,’ I said, ‘they have to eliminate every sign of their history; otherwise when you cracked one message you’d crack them all.’

‘That doesn’t affect my basic contention,’ he said. ‘If you are trying to eliminate history from all your ciphers, that also creates a connection between them.’

That really did open my eyes!

He continued, ‘Changing a cipher can be compared to changing a face — it is shaped by trends in evolution. The difference is that the changes of a human face are always predicated upon the same basis — no matter what you do it is still a face, though you may have changed it to make it even more face-like, even more perfect. The changes that you can introduce to a cipher are completely different — today it is a human face, but tomorrow you can make it change into something else — a horse’s face or a dog’s face, or maybe the face of something else entirely. It has no fixed parameters. But no matter how much you change it, the internal features are simply refined, clarified, advanced, rendered even more perfect — that is an evolutionary development that you cannot escape. It is a given that every effort is made to change the face, but it is also a given that you try and make the internal structure more refined — these two givens create a twin path that goes right to the heart of any new cipher. If you can find those two paths in the forest that is the history of cryptography, then they will help you in decryption.’

While he was explaining this, he was pointing to the columns of figures written up around the room like a hoard of ants. Sometimes his finger moved, sometimes it was still, as if he were gradually working his way through to the very heart of the matter.

To tell you the truth, I was astounded by his idea of the twin paths. I understood immediately that although in principle these two paths had to exist, in actual fact they might well not exist at all. Maybe nobody else realized, but if you treated those paths as strings and pulled on them, the person tugging would in the end find himself garrotted. .

Of course I will explain what I mean. Tell me, what does it feel like when you walk closer and closer to a bonfire?

Exactly. You will feel a hot, burning sensation. After that, you do not dare to get too close; you want to preserve a certain distance, so that you won’t get burned again. The same principles apply when you get close to a person — the influence that a particular person exerts over you depends on their individual attractiveness, character and capacities. I can tell you categorically, regardless of whether you are talking about a person who creates ciphers or a person who decrypts them, cryptographers are the most remarkable people, with really unusual capacities — their minds are like black holes. Any one of them is capable of exerting an enormous influence upon their fellows. When you walk into the forest that is a cipher, it is like walking through a jungle in which there are countless traps — at every step you run the risk of falling into one and not being able to get out again. That is why those who create ciphers (just like those who unlock them) don’t dare think too much about the history of encryption, because each concept, each theory in the history of this field can attract you like a magnet; can destroy you. The minute your attention has been distracted by one of these concepts, you are worthless as a cryptographer, because ciphers cannot have any intrinsic similarity to one another, to prevent them from being cracked too easily. Any similarity would make the two ciphers so much rubbish — ciphers are indeed heartless, mysterious things.

Well, now you can see why I was so amazed — the two paths theory that Rong Jinzhen had developed resulted in him disobeying one of the cardinal rules in cryptography. I don’t know whether he was ignorant of it, or whether he knew and decided to go ahead anyway. Given the first shock that he had caused me, I think that it is most likely that he knew and had decided to go ahead regardless — he was intentionally breaking one of our cardinal rules. When he hung the diagrams he had worked out from the history of cryptography up on his walls, he was demonstrating that he was of no mean intelligence. He was breaking the rules not because he was stupid and ignorant, but because he knew exactly what he was doing and was brave enough to go ahead with it.

When I heard his two paths theory, I didn’t criticize him the way that maybe I ought to have — I was struck with a kind of silent admiration, not unmixed with jealousy, because he was clearly way ahead of the rest of us.

At that time, he had not even spent six months in the cryptography unit.

I was very worried about him, because it seemed to me that he was in a very perilous situation. As you will now realize, Rong Jinzhen wanted to tug on the two strings that he had found — that meant that he was proposing to become entrenched behind every concept and theory in the history of cryptography, cutting his way through each of the countless layers of evolution to reach to the underlying principles. Every single layer would represent endlessly attractive theories and concepts, any one of which might lay its dead hand upon his mind and turn everything that he had done into worthless rubbish. That is why for so many years there had been one unwritten rule in cryptography: Avoid history! Everyone was perfectly well aware of the fact that there — in the history of the subject — there was no doubt any number of opportunities and pointers to help decrypt modern ciphers. But the fear of going in and not being able to find a way out overcame all other considerations — that was more important than any information to be found therein.

If I may put it in these terms, the forest that is the history of cryptography is very silent and very lonely. There are no people there to ask the way from; nobody would dare to ask for directions! This is one of the tragedies of cryptography — they have lost the mirror of history, they have lost the sense of community that comes from planting the same seeds and harvesting the same fruit. Their work is that difficult and mysterious; their souls are that lonely and alienated — they cannot even climb on the bodies of those who went on ahead. At every stage they are faced with closed doors, with mantraps, forcing them to travel by side roads, to avoid any open path. For history to have become a troublesome burden to later generations. . what an unhappy state of affairs! That is the reason why so many geniuses have been buried within the borders of cryptography — the number is appallingly high!. .

. . Okay, let me explain this in simple terms. The usual way that cryptography proceeds is by a slow process of elimination: the first thing that happens is that intelligence agents collect a load of relevant information and you then try and use this information to develop hypotheses — this feels very much like using a limitless number of keys to open a limitless number of doors. You have to design and make the keys and doors yourself — how endless the task is in practice is determined by how much material you have to work with; it is also determined by how sensitive you are to the cipher you are working with. I should explain that this is a very simple and stupid way of proceeding, but it is also the safest, the most secure, and the most effective. This is particularly the case when you are trying to decrypt a high-level cipher. Given the comparatively high success rate, this method is still in use today.

But Rong Jinzhen, as you understand, was not interested in doing it the traditional way. He had gone rushing straight into forbidden territory — in spite of the fact that he was a cryptographer he was immersing himself in the history of the field, standing on the shoulders of the giants of previous generations, and the only result to be expected from this was a terrible, frightening one. Of course if it worked, if he was able to come and go through every trap set by cryptographers of old, that would be a genuinely unbelievably impressive achievement. At the very least he would be able to narrow the focus of his search. Say for example that if there were 10,000 little byroads, he might be able to eliminate one half by this process — maybe less. The number that he would be able to eliminate would determine the prospect of success for his approach. That would decide how feasible it would be to put his two path theory into practice. To tell the truth, the success rate for such a thing was so low that very few people tried it and the ones that had succeeded were as rare as morning stars. In the world of cryptography, there would only be two types of people prepared to run so great a risk. One would be a genius, a real genius, and the other would be a lunatic. A lunatic is afraid of nothing, because he does not understand that the thing is genuinely frightening. A genius is afraid of nothing, because he knows he is armed with unusual weapons. Once he has made up his mind to the task, any difficult or dangerous obstacle can be overcome.

To tell you the truth, at that time I was not sure if Rong Jinzhen was a genius or a lunatic, but there was one thing that I was absolutely certain of — I was not going to be surprised if he turned out to do amazing things or did nothing at all; whether he became a hero or the whole thing ended in tragedy. So when he decrypted PURPLE without a word to anyone, I was not surprised at all — I just felt a great relief on his behalf. At the same time I was so impressed I really felt like getting down on my knees and kowtowing to him.

I should also explain that after Jinzhen cracked PURPLE, we discovered that all the suggestions that Jan Liseiwicz had been sending him for how to decrypt it were completely wrong. That means that we were very lucky that right from the beginning, the team working on deciphering PURPLE had decided not to let him know what was going on — otherwise he might well have ended up taking completely the wrong path, in which case he would never have been able to decrypt it. There are all sorts of things where it is very difficult to sort out the rights and wrongs; originally it seemed terribly unfair that he should not be allowed to see the letters Liseiwicz was sending him, but as it turned out, it was all for the best — kind of like dropping a sesame seed and picking up a pearl. As to why Liseiwicz’s suggestions were so wrong, there seemed to be two possibilities. One is that it was intentional: he was trying to ruin our work. The other is that it was unintentional: he was making the same mistakes in his own attempts to decrypt PURPLE. Given the situation as we understood it then, it seemed like the second option was the most likely, because he kept telling us that PURPLE was impossible to decrypt. .

[To be continued]

PURPLE had been cracked!

Rong Jinzhen did it!

It goes without saying that in the weeks and months that followed, this mysterious young man reaped enormous rewards for what he had achieved. It did not matter that he was as solitary as before — living alone, working alone; it did not matter that he carried on reading his novels, playing chess with people, interpreting their dreams, saying little, impassive in company, not caring who he was speaking to — he was absolutely the same as he had always been. The difference was how everyone else felt about him, which had undergone a complete revolution — now everyone believed in his genius, his abilities and his luck.

There was not a man or woman in the whole of Unit 701 who did not know him and respect him. As he walked back and forward, alone as usual, even the dogs seemed to recognize him. Everyone understood that even if all the stars in the heavens dropped from the sky, his star would still be shining there forever — he had achieved more glory than anyone could use up in the course of a lifetime. As year followed year, people watched his promotion: team leader, deputy group leader, group leader, deputy section chief. . he accepted it all calmly, with perfect modesty. As they say, still waters run deep.

That was how people felt about it — they admired him without jealousy, they sighed but without sadness. They had all come to accept that he was unique, that there was no one else like him, that there was no point in trying to compete. Ten years later, in 1966, he became chief of the cryptography section — a position that would have taken anyone else twice as long or more to achieve. However, everyone seemed to have been expecting it of him; there was no sense of amazement at his early promotion. Everyone seemed convinced that sooner or later he would end up taking over management of the whole of Unit 701 — the title of director was just waiting until the right moment before it settled down upon this silent young man’s head.

It would have been perfectly easy for the thing that everyone was expecting and waiting for to happen, because in Unit 701, as in any secret organization, it would not be easy for the vast majority of the senior managers to take on the heavy responsibilities of the job. Furthermore Rong Jinzhen’s impassive and adamantine personality seemed to make him a very suitable choice for the role of head of a secret unit.

However, in the space of just a couple of days at the end of 1969, something happened. Even today, very few people know what occurred in those crucial hours, and so explaining the course of events is the subject of the next section of this book.