What an ambitious book! Geek fiction at its best, historical spy thriller and treaty on cryptographic algorithms - what else could you want in a book? Oh, in-depth character devolopment? Nah, that would have been TOO ambitious. It's not a Philip Roth or John Irving novel. More like Michael Crichton, well researched and full of geekish excitement about technical details as well as their large scale implications. After Michael Crichton's "Prey" the second novel I read that contained actual computer code.
The story is complex, to say the least, and told non-linearly. Basically, two different time lines are followed in parallel until they meet towards the end of the book (after 1000+ pages, that is), one is set during World War II and covers Nazis, submarines, lots of gold, and of course the various cryptographic codes used on both sides; the other time line is set in the 1990 (i.e. the present at the time the book was written) and is set mostly in the Phillipines and deals with the business operations of a telecommunications company building undersea internet connections and data storage facilities. But really it's a about gold as well.
The book is a wild and entertaining ride, which makes up for its somewhat hasty conclusion.
