‘First,’ he said, ‘as we all know, RECOVERY is one of the world’s most difficult ciphers, and it must be reckoned to be secure for at least a decade. That means that under normal circumstances no one can crack it in anything less than ten years. Why have we decided to break it? Because we’ve decided to take the initiative in the current cross-Straits tension with Taiwan. How long is this tension going to last? A year? Two years? Or will it be ten? Or twenty? I’m thinking a year or two at the most. That means that in order to be of any use, we have to crack this cipher within the shortest possible time – within the next year or two. But the thing is that we might well not even begin to make headway for years. There you are, looking all solemn. You’re mad, I tell you, completely insane; and if you don’t believe me, just wait and see …’

Comrade Chen was that kind of person – mostly he wouldn’t say much, but if he did speak it was impossible to argue with him. He didn’t beat about the bush, he didn’t try and avoid the issue, and he didn’t try to be accommodating – he would just tell it to you straight and leave everyone feeling awkward. In fact we understood his point of view perfectly, but this was a decision by our superiors and what could we do other than obey? I said that, but Comrade Chen immediately set on me again.

‘I understand that this decision came from our superiors, but we all know it’s completely stupid. There’s no need to take it so seriously, getting everybody involved and now also bringing in a mathematician specially from outside. Of course, now she’s here she’s very welcome, but if you ask my opinion, good steel should be left for use in knives, and so we ought to set her to cracking other ciphers, and just put a couple of people to work on RECOVERY, so that it looks OK to our superiors.’

Was this a suitable thing for a Bureau Chief to say? If any of our superiors had heard him, he would have been fired! I knew though that he didn’t like being in administration. The cryptography division was a vocational work unit, but even so the better you were at your job the more likely you were to be promoted into administration. He was an uncrowned king.

I had heard Chen speak like this many times, and I couldn’t be bothered to argue with him. I wasn’t expecting though that Huang Yiyi would take it seriously. She said, ‘If I understand you correctly, there is no way that we can crack RECOVERY.’

‘Not in the short term.’