Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

For the past few weeks, I've been making my way through Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. If you've seen a copy, it's a mammoth book. It's also a meandering book. There are three main plot threads, and a fourth creeps in half way through the book.

Essentially, this book--as you can probably guess from the title--is about cryptography. Two of the three threads take place during World War II. One follows a marine who participates in the Double Cross System, which helped keep the Nazis from finding out that their secure code system had been broken. Another thread follows a mathematician who worked for the Ultra program and for Double Cross. The third thread follows the descendents of the World War II characters. (I've since found out that The Baroque Cycle of novels follows the ancestors of the Cryptonomicon characters.)

The first two plot threads involve Shaftoe and Waterhouse's attempts to keep Ultra, and the fact that they've cracked their codes, a secret. What fascinates me about these plot threads is how elaborate Ultra's safeguards were. While the allies would use the intelligence they got from the Ultra transcripts, they did everything they could to make the Nazis think that they got their information from other sources. They'd send up spotter planes, or send thank you notes to non-existent spies, and all sorts of other things.

The last plot thread involves a latter-day Waterhouse's project to create a data haven in the Pacific. I'm not as interested in this thread as I am in the WWII threads, but I will admit that I'm interested to see how it all links together.

All that ties these characters together is their involvement with cryptography, information, and secrets. Well, and their ancestry. But other than that, it seems like two books got shuffled together. Granted, I haven't finished the book yet, and I have to hope that the connections will be revealed.