Chen got so angry that he walked out. When the meeting was over he came to my office, and the moment he got through the door he started shouting at me, complaining about Huang Yiyi’s behaviour. I spoke up for her, which really didn’t please Chen, and he started to blame me for what had happened. ‘It is not that I want to criticize you, but sometimes you seem to trust her and give in to her too much. That’s a bad thing. I’ve been really puzzled that you support her over this idea of finding the key in order to decrypt this cipher, which is a topsy-turvy approach.’

‘What do you mean, topsy-turvy? It’s a new way of dealing with the thing.’

‘What do you mean, a new way? It’s clearly a dead end. Humph. I’ve been cracking ciphers for more than twenty years, and I’ve never heard of trying to find the key first. What is the key anyway? It is like the key to a room, and if I give you that key, you can open the door; but if what you want is actually in the safe which you can’t open – what’s the point? On the other hand, if I can open the safe I don’t need a key: I can climb in through the window …’

I shook my head and looked silently at Chen. He really was getting past it: he didn’t know about the advances in Western computing, or understand that a revolution had taken place both in the development of ciphers and in their decryption. In modern ciphers the key is given as part of the cipher text: they are indivisible, in the same way as modern metallurgy transforms aluminium and iron into a completely new material. How can you separate the constituent elements?

It was that day, after my conversation with Chen, that I suddenly got the idea of going to the Soviet Union. If Anderov wouldn’t write back, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t go to Russia and find him myself, did it?

21

My idea was supported by my superiors, and Director Tie told me to get things organized and do the round trip as quickly as possible. The day before I set out, I decided to go and talk to Huang Yiyi. I found her in the woods, feeding biscuits to the squirrels. From the moment she learnt the truth about Xiaoyu she had been ignoring me. She caught sight of me but pretended she hadn’t seen me, and walked deeper into the woods. I had to shout at her to stop. She stood under a tree and waited for me to catch up with her, and then she said in a depressed way, ‘Are you here to try and raise my revolutionary consciousness? Or are you afraid I’m suicidal, or that I’m going to stop working for you?’