Decoded (28 page)

Could it be that this thief had some unknown power, some unknown strength?

Of course not.

Was it because Rong Jinzhen was weak, frail?

Exactly!

It was all because that little criminal ran off with something Rong Jinzhen considered to be sacred as well as secret: the notebook! This thing was of the greatest importance to him and yet so insubstantial: like a person’s heart that can’t survive any blows – even the slightest knock can bring about death.

Now I’m sure you understand this. In normal situations, your most precious and sacred belonging, the thing you value most, ought to be kept in the safest, most secure place possible. In the case of Rong Jinzhen’s notebook, it should have been placed in the safe-deposit box; putting it in his leather attaché case was a mistake, a moment of negligence. But looking at it the other way round, if you think the thief was an actual enemy agent, a member of X country’s secret service whose mission it was to steal Rong Jinzhen’s notebook, then as a secret agent, it would be most unlikely that he would imagine that Rong Jinzhen could place that oh-so-important notebook, containing information requiring the utmost protection and vigilance, inside a completely unsecured leather briefcase. Consequently, his primary objective would not have been the attaché case; it could only have been the safe-deposit box. In essence then, if we were still to consider that the thief was some agent or other tasked with stealing the notebook, then having it placed in Rong Jinzhen’s leather briefcase was an ingenious means of avoiding calamity.

Later on I hypothesized again that if Rong Jinzhen’s action – placing the notebook in the leather attaché case – wasn’t unintentional, but rather deliberate, and he had become entangled in an actual special operation, then he was not simply the victim of a thief. Think about it for a moment. The cunning in his placing the notebook in his briefcase couldn’t be more sublime: the aim must have been to lure the special operative into a most sophisticated trap, right? This train of thought brought me back to BLACK. I thought, what if the creator of BLACK had taken the most vital means to decipher it – the key – and instead of hiding it out of the way, burying it deep within the cipher itself, had left it out in the open; had deliberately
not
put it in a safe-deposit box, but rather a leather attaché case. In that case Rong Jinzhen, this man who had searched so strenuously and persistently for the key to BLACK, was like the secret agent looking for the notebook in the wrong place.

As this thought flashed through my mind, I couldn’t help but become excited.

To tell you the truth, in terms of logic, my idea was completely absurd; but its absurdity latched on precisely to the two strange phenomena I mentioned earlier. Of these two, the former seemed to suggest that BLACK was extremely abstruse – this would be the reason why Rong Jinzhen had been unable to take the last step to decipher it; the latter seemed to suggest that BLACK was extremely simple – this would explain why over the course of three years no errors in the cipher had been discerned. You see? Only the most uncomplicated of things can exercise the right of unconstrained movement; only they can seek and obtain beauty.

Of course, strictly speaking, there are two kinds of simplicity possible in these circumstances. One type is an artificial simplicity. The bastard who created BLACK possessed a rare ingenuity: he was able to create any old cipher he pleased, a cipher that was incredibly uncomplicated for him, but for me was extremely sophisticated, impenetrable. The other type of simplicity is a genuine one that uses cunning as a substitute for sophistication: it baffles you with its ultrasimplicity, it conspires against you, entraps you; it places its key right in front of you, in a leather attaché case.

You can imagine what happened afterwards. If BLACK possessed an artificial kind of simplicity, then I wouldn’t be able to decipher it because the person we were up against – the person responsible for creating it – was a genius of the kind we might not see for another thousand years. Later, I realized that Rong Jinzhen had been ensnared within this simulated and obstinate sort of simplicity; or to put it another way, he had been entrapped by this bogus minimalism, he had been bewitched and deceived by it. That said, it was actually quite logical that he would have been deceived: it was practicably inevitable. On the one hand . . . how should I put it? Hmmm, like this perhaps. Imagine that you and I are involved in a boxing match and you’ve just knocked me to the mat. Then, from my corner, another person jumps into the ring to fight you. Now you outmatch this person in every way, but at the very least he is going to be better than me, right? Well, Rong Jinzhen was in this kind of situation. He had deciphered PURPLE, he was the winner in the ring, he had proved his formidability; in his mind he had already come out on top against a superior opponent, and he was ready for the next one. On the other hand, speaking in terms of logic, only an artificial simplicity could successfully bring together and unite the two strange phenomena found in this cipher; otherwise they would be contradictory, in opposition. It was here at this point that Rong Jinzhen committed the error that all geniuses make, because from his point of view for such a high-level cipher to exhibit such an obvious contradiction was beyond the realm of possibility; it was unthinkable. He had broken PURPLE, he was fully aware of the deliberation and meticulousness needed in its construction. So, coming face to face with such a contradictory cipher, his mind was unable to analyse the two elements, unable to open them up; the most heroic efforts left him unable to do more than touch the fringes. That is the strength of artificial simplicity: all a genius could do was to touch its fringes.

In sum, this was where Rong Jinzhen encountered the most damage to his intellect: he had become hopelessly enthralled by this synthetic simplicity and was unable to extricate himself from it. This also demonstrates precisely Rong Jinzhen’s strength and courage in challenging such a redoubtable opponent. His mind thirsted to engage with this genius in hand-to-hand combat, to fight him at close quarters!

I am not like Rong Jinzhen. For me, such artificial simplicity was frightening; it made me despair. Thus this one route for deciphering BLACK was blocked. But since one route was blocked, another one was naturally laid open at my feet. So the real simplicity – that the key to deciphering BLACK was indeed stowed away in a leather attaché case – flashed before me. I felt a supreme happiness, as though I had finally found a way out of my predicament; as if a hand had appeared from out of nowhere to lift the curtain from before my eyes and throw it upon the ground, then trample on it . . .

Yes, yes, I was so overjoyed, so excited – whenever I think of this I can’t help but get extremely excited. Over the course of my life, this was my greatest moment, and because of it, my life now is calm, undisturbed, peaceful and long. It was as though heaven had gathered up all the good fortune in this world and out of pity had bestowed it upon me. I felt small; I was only half-conscious; I felt that I had returned to the protection of a mother’s womb. It was a real blessing, like everything being given to you by someone else: you didn’t have to ask for it and you didn’t have to reciprocate; like a tree that simply gives its fruit.

Ah, but the mood of that beautiful moment was fleeting – I couldn’t hold onto it. I try to remember, but my mind is a blank. I can only call to mind that at the time I never even had the chance to confirm my assumption. One reason is perhaps because I feared that it would be exposed; another was perhaps because I was superstitious about the time of day: three in the morning. I had heard that after three in the morning the world belongs to both men and ghosts – this is when the soul and the spirit are at their most powerful. That’s how it was: in the middle of the night, in my silent office, I was like a convict repeatedly pacing back and forth, at once listening to the excited beating of my heart while trying to calm myself down – up until that fateful time, up until three in the morning. Afterwards, I finally pulled out a calculator (the one gifted to Rong Jinzhen by Headquarters, the one capable of over 40,000 calculations) and devoted myself to confirming my absurd and bizarre assumption. I don’t know how much time it took, I only remember that once I deciphered BLACK, I stormed out of the cave in a frenzy (at that time our offices were still underground in a mountain cave), fell to the ground and wailed loudly, worshipping heaven and earth. It was still dark outside, just before dawn.

Fast? Of course it was fast! Don’t you see, the cryptographic key to BLACK was in a leather attaché case!

Ah, who would have imagined it: BLACK had no real lock on it!

The cryptographic key was the number zero!

It was nothing!

Absolute nothing!

Er – um – I don’t know why I am explaining things in so much detail. Let me make an analogy. Let us say that BLACK is like a house concealed far, far away, high up in the vast sky. There are countless doors to this house, all of them identical down to the smallest detail and all of them locked. What is more, only one of these many doors can actually be opened. You can waste an eternity amid all of these doors, none of which you will ever be able to open and which look just the same as the real door. If you fancy entering this building, you must first search through the boundless universe to find where it is hidden and then you must locate the one single door that opens, out of an uncountable number of fake doors. Should you find the real door, you still have to hunt for the one key that can open it. At that time, Rong Jinzhen had not found the key. He had found the house, he had found the one real door, but he had not found the key.

Now, when I talk about searching for the key, as I just said, this involves trying one key after another in the keyhole. Generally, to forge such keys cryptanalysts rely upon their own intellect and imagination: they create a key and try it; if it doesn’t work, they create another and try that, and so on and so forth. This was how Rong Jinzhen spent the year up to the point where he lost his notebook. You can just imagine how many keys he must have gone through. Even to get to that point, you should begin to realize, a successful cryptanalyst doesn’t only need genius; he also needs the luck of the gods. You could say that a talented cryptanalyst has an unlimited number of keys in his mind and there must be one that will ultimately work. The problem is you can never know for certain when you will come upon that key: will it be when you first set out, in the middle of the work, or in the final stages? It is all a matter of serendipity.

Serendipity is dangerous enough to destroy everything!

Serendipity is miraculous enough to create everything!

But in my opinion, the danger and luck supposedly attached to this type of serendipity doesn’t exist, because in my mind there are no keys, I cannot manufacture them. As a result I felt none of the pain and fortune of searching them out. Now at that time, if that door was truly and firmly locked, if it had in fact required a key, then you can imagine what the result would have been – it would have been forever impossible for me to open it. It is very incongruous, but the door did indeed appear to be locked tight when in actual fact it wasn’t; it was nothing but a false façade, all I had to do was push a little and it swung open. That was all there was to it. The key to unlocking BLACK was so bizarre that people were unable to believe it; they dared not trust it, and even when the door swung open and I saw everything that was inside, I still had some difficulty believing in what I saw. I thought it must all be unreal – a mirage, an illusion, a dream.

Ah, this cipher was truly the work of the devil!

Only the devil possesses such barbarous courage and traitorous gall!

Only the devil possesses such an absurdly malicious intellect!

The devil had deftly dodged Rong Jinzhen’s attack, but had no answer for mine – me, the common man, the pleb. Still, heaven knows and I know that all of this had been made possible by Rong Jinzhen; thanks to his notebook I had been carried high up into the ether, to pass through disaster and reveal the hidden secret of BLACK. Perhaps you might say that this was unintentional, but you tell me – in this world, which ciphers aren’t decrypted by a mixture of hard work and luck? All of them are deciphered by this mixture, if not why do we say that decrypting ciphers calls for a luck that comes from far beyond the stars? Why do we say that they require auspicious smoke to be emanating from a person’s ancestral tombs?

Indeed, in this world there is not a single cipher that has not been decrypted with equal parts of ingenuity and good fortune!

Ha ha, young fellow: you never thought that today you would discover my own secret, eh? I should explain that all the things I’ve told you today are my secrets, my own personal secrets: I’ve never told anyone else. You must be wondering why I told you these things which I have never mentioned to another person. Why should I reveal to you my own inadequacies? I’ll tell you. I am nearly eighty years old now: who knows when Death will make its call, and I need no longer live with all this undeserved glory . . .

[End of interview]

Finally the old man told me that the reason why our enemy created BLACK – a cipher with no key – was because they had felt so dejected after PURPLE had been deciphered and they had realized that they were at a dead end with their work. They understood, after just one confrontation with Rong Jinzhen, that his was a talent to be reckoned with. If they continued to stubbornly persist in challenging him, their own destruction was assured. As a result they risked universal commendation and in their madness brought forth this singularly freakish and malicious cipher: BLACK.

However, they never realized that Rong Jinzhen had his last countermove ready and waiting for them. To use the old man’s words: Rong Jinzhen had passed through destruction – amazingly, he had already passed on to his colleagues the secret of BLACK’s freakish birth by means of his notebook. In the history of cryptography he was one of a kind.