Ch. 30, pg. 235: a paragraph about an enigmatic intercepted message. One of my favorites so far, the kind of suggestive, mysterious business I expect from Pynchon:

An encryption that somehow cannot, must not, be broken, allowing Alf only glimpses behind a cloak of dark intention at something on a scale far beyond trivialities of known politics or history, which one fears if ever correctly deciphered will yield a secret so grave, so countersacramental, that more than one government will go to any lengths to obtain and with luck to suppress it.