Cryptonomicon

Cryptonomicon is a novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1999 and set in two periods at once.

During the Second World War the Allied codebreakers have to use the intelligence they gather without ever revealing that they have it, which means convincing the enemy that the ciphers are still secure. Waterhouse works on that problem alongside the marine Bobby Shaftoe, his German opposite number, and a cast of officers whose number includes Churchill and Roosevelt. In the late 1990s Waterhouse's grandson Randy is part of a group building a data haven in a small Pacific sultanate, where encrypted money could move outside anybody's jurisdiction. Randy's company is chasing the same hoard of wartime gold that his grandfather's unit was paid in, and the people who want the data haven to work are not all pursuing the same thing. The two stories converge on buried treasure, a family secret and a great deal of missing paperwork, and the novel uses cryptology, mathematics and long technical conversations to bring them together.

Stephenson writes long digressions with obvious pleasure, and the book sits somewhere between a historical novel and a techno-thriller.