The Cipher

VIKING

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First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

Copyright © 2015 by John C. Ford

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS C
ATALOGING
-
IN
-
PUBLICA
TION DATA

Ford, John C. (John Christopher), date-

The cipher / John C. Ford.

pages cm

Summary: “Robert ‘Smiles' Smylie and his friend Ben become embroiled in a high-stakes negotiation with a pair of suspicious Feds when Ben cracks a code with the power to unlock all the Internet's secrets”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-101-62261-2

[1. Ciphers—Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 3. Computer crimes—Fiction. 4. Internet—Security measures—Fiction. 5. New England—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.F75315Cip 2015

[Fic]—dc23

2014019432

TO
MY
FATHER
,
JOSEPH
FORD

THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS
is a real mathematics theory, first proposed in 1859, which remains unproven to this day. The things you will read in this book about its importance to modern encryption systems are true.

The rest, thankfully, is not.

“I don't believe in mathematics.”

—Albert Einstein

SIXTEEN YEARS AGO

THE MAN IN
the stolen car called himself Andrei Tarasov.

He drove west out of the city, fleeing Boston into a black December night. The car's heater had gone out, and an icy wind knifed in through its rusted-out frame. The man's frozen breath swirled before him; his fingers stung with cold. He ignored the pain. There was no time to think about comfort.

He had been awake for two days straight, ever since the men had come for him, and his body was long past the point of exhaustion. Fear alone kept him alert now. His eyes darted over the highway, watching for any sign that they had picked up his trail. He saw none—just the sparkling lights of Boston receding in the rearview mirror, slipping back through the snowfall that danced across the road.

The car shuddered with effort up a rise. In the rearview mirror, the city lights jostled with the vibration.

A vast skyline jittering in the night—it was just how Boston had appeared to him the first time, years ago, his face pressed to the cold plastic of an airplane window. He had been a different person then, with a different name. An innocent kid with a gift for mathematics, brought to the United States on scholarship. He'd never been outside Russia, much less seen an American city, and its glistening towers had filled him with awe. Now, a wanted man, he watched the city vanish behind him and knew he would never see it again.

The men had appeared the day before. Rounding the corner on his walk home, he'd spotted a black sedan sitting fifty yards from his apartment. The car was far too nice to belong on his street. His neighbors were poor immigrant families who lived on top of one another in broken-down homes, the narrow gaps between them webbed with laundry lines. The man who called himself Andrei Tarasov was not wealthy, either. He knew things of tremendous value, though, and he had a good many secrets.

At the sight of the car, he'd dashed into a corner market. Nestling behind a cooler at the window, he took shallow breaths that betrayed his sudden panic. A part of him had known the day would come; the dread of it kept him up nights, drawing dark circles under his eyes. If he was right, the men in the car worked for the State Department. They would have a long file on him. They would know of his contacts with the Russian spy network.

He had been the ideal recruit: an advanced student of cryptography at Harvard, doing government-sponsored research on intelligence systems. A perfect candidate to funnel information back to Moscow.

He waited behind the cooler for long minutes, until finally a man opened the passenger door. The flash of metal on his overcoat might have been an American flag pin. The curl of plastic extending from his scarf might have been an earpiece. The man walked the length of the street and back again. If you weren't watching closely, you wouldn't have noticed the attention he paid to a particular apartment fifty yards from his car.

The man who called himself Andrei Tarasov did notice, and he knew then that his life was over. He rushed out the back exit and made it to the Jamaica Plain community bank just before closing, where he withdrew his meager savings. Within an hour he had bought the Avenger and an unregistered Walther P88 pistol from a Ukrainian man on his block known to traffic in stolen goods. Over that night and the following day, he put his affairs in order as best he could while staying clear of the men keeping watch over his apartment.

As far as he knew, they hadn't caught up with him yet. He sped forward, blowing warmth into the curled fists of his gloveless hands. The car was all but empty—he had left his possessions behind. The only two things that mattered now lay beside him on the passenger's seat: the gun and a thin brown package.

They skittered across the cold-hardened plastic as he turned off the highway. The rattle of the engine softened as he eased onto a two-lane road, taking comfort in the blanketing darkness of the suburb. The men would have a hard time taking him by surprise out here.

The snow was falling thicker now, frosting the handsome trees of the suburb. A pristine white carpet materialized on the street as he drove on—still checking for followers, still finding none. It was a fairy-tale place, this suburb. He was used to cramped spaces, littered pavement, the blare of city life. Here the lawns stretched endlessly away from the street, rolling back to majestic houses ablaze with warm lights.

He watched for street numbers on the gates outside the homes. The one he had been searching for appeared on his left, a grand brick affair with gleaming white columns lining the front. He eased to the curb and cut the engine. The quiet of the snow muffled what little sound he made exiting the car. Against the curtains in an upstairs window, the shadowed form of a woman cradled a child against her shoulder. Calming it from a bad dream, perhaps.

The woman's head was bent to the child, her full attention occupied. He had little fear she would notice as he approached the house by the front path. Crouching at the door, he eased the mail slot open. The package he balanced there appeared an ordinary thing from the outside: a regular brown package, just large enough to hold a pad of paper. At his push, it whispered to the floor.

He retreated down the steps and stationed himself under a tree. In his right hand, he held the gun.

The snow slanted down through his vision, and in that final moment he was no longer standing under a tree in Massachusetts. He was a kid in Saint Petersburg, packing a suitcase while a blizzard blew outside his window. He was standing in the roadside slush, waiting for the bus to the airport. He was kissing his mom good-bye, wiping snow from her graying hair. His eyes filled with tears, but it was only the winter wind. He was seventeen, a prodigy on his way to America, and he had never been more excited.

He had a great dream then: a dream to solve the Riemann Hypothesis. It was the goal of all great mathematicians. Whoever did it would stand with Newton and Einstein as one of history's greatest thinkers. The man who called himself Andrei Tarasov had been bold then, and when his plane lifted off from Saint Petersburg, he thought he would be the one.

But mathematics was a young man's game, and he was over thirty now.

His season for greatness had passed, and now he stood under the brittle branches of the tree, his shoulders flecked with snow, and considered the mother and child in the window. The woman's shadow waved across the curtains and rested her young one down in bed. One day that child would understand what he had left inside the package. That would be his legacy now.

He shut his eyes, raised his right arm, and hoped the shot wouldn't disturb the child's sleep.