Anderov used to say that impetuosity is the devil, and so impetuous people often make mistakes. I have an impetuous nature, even though I always try to appear serious. That day, listening to what Huang Yiyi said, looking after her as she rushed out, I could feel myself getting excited. I was thinking that if I put her under pressure, and she really threw herself wholeheartedly into cracking RECOVERY, perhaps she’d get lucky. As I have said, and as everyone who has ever worked in cryptography knows, cracking a cipher requires knowledge, experience and a touch of genius; but more than that you need a luck that comes from far beyond the stars. Luck is a mysterious thing, but it might be attracted by a display of diligence on Huang Yiyi’s part, because she was certainly amazingly gifted, and her training and mathematical abilities were unequalled. If she plunged into RECOVERY, she would dive deeper and go further than anyone else could; and luck is to be found in the deepest and most distant places. For someone without those kinds of abilities, luck is something that moves through the darkness: though you may want to grasp it, it’s pure chance whether you stumble across it or not. But for someone who can dive deep, luck may be at the edge of the horizon or it may be just in front of you, dancing around you, and even if you don’t try and grasp it, it may still come to you. There’s a saying: ‘Luck is unavoidable’, and that’s exactly what it means. RECOVERY was a very difficult cipher, but Huang Yiyi was no ordinary mathematician; she had been von Neumann’s assistant, she was at the very top of her profession.

Other people might not know this, but I did.

This is why, when everyone else – including Chen – had given up hoping that Huang Yiyi might crack RECOVERY, I continued to invest heavily in her. You might say that this was a secret investment, because I never told anyone else about her unusual background. As I have explained, this was part of my plan. More than anyone else in Unit 701, I hoped she would crack RECOVERY. If she did, everything would work out for both of us. Both Bureau Chief Chen and Unit Director Luo were coming up to retirement age, and if Huang Yiyi cracked RECOVERY without too many problems, they would indubitably appoint her as the new head of cryptography, and I might well replace Comrade Luo as Director of Unit 701.

That was my secret, and my fate.

My fate was not in my own hands, but in Huang Yiyi’s.