The Cipher (10 page)

Smiles heard shifting behind him, and when he turned Ben was up on his elbows. “Are you serious? That was your
mom
? My God, Smiles . . .”

Ben stopped, unsure of what to say, and just as suddenly as he'd started talking about his mother, Smiles wished he'd kept his mouth shut. He couldn't expect Ben to make it better for him.

“Are you—”

“Yeah, fine,” Smiles said. He needed to move. He walked to the door and turned back. “Look, you gonna be okay here for a while?”

“Where are you going?”

“For a walk, I guess,” he said. And then Smiles wobbled aimlessly into the hall, wishing he were the kind of person who could deal with big problems.

47

“BLACKJACK.”

The dealer pushed three more purple chips in front of Smiles.

The poker room had been too crowded to deal with, so Smiles was playing blackjack at a hundred-dollar minimum table. It was just him, the dealer, and a crotchety Asian woman in a tennis visor at a “high-stakes” table sectioned off from the main casino. A few people hung at the bronze railing, looking on with hungry eyes. Like they were peering into a limousine, wondering if a star was inside.

His stacks of chips teetered on the velvet. He must have been up over $5,000 with the ridiculous string of blackjacks he'd had. Any other day, it would have been cause for major celebration. The only thing he could think about now, though, was Ben's discovery.

“Blackjack
again
,” the dealer said, and shoved more chips across. He tossed a black hundred-dollar chip back to her for a tip. She was definitely more excited about all this than he was.

Of course, she didn't know that a genius kid had just discovered a way to destabilize her whole way of life. To see all her banking records. To steal money from her casino. To find out any electronic secret that she'd ever had. Not that anyone would care about her little secrets, when they could cause floods and wars and who knew what else.

There'd be panic if people knew. Those people collected at the rail, they'd be rushing home, stocking up on powdered milk and canned goods and duct tape. Or whatever you were supposed to buy in, like, a code-red situation.

Smiles couldn't blame Ben for being scared. His algorithm might have been an amazing discovery, but he'd have to keep it under wraps forever—never getting any credit, never getting any reward. It was too dangerous to share with anyone. Even telling the NSA guys would be taking a huge chance. It made Smiles think of those sci-fi movies where a friendly alien comes to Earth and all the government wants to do is hold it captive and stick it with needles. Smiles wondered how long Ben could take the strain of holding on to such explosive knowledge.

The kicker, of course, was that it could take down Alyce Systems, too.

“Dealer busts.” More chips for Smiles.

“Lucky boy,” said a voice behind him.

It was Erin, the pixie from the registration desk. Showered and fresh, in a white sundress that showed off her tan. The tension in Smiles's neck melted away at the sight of her.

He shrugged at his tower of chips. “Guess so.”

The Asian woman harrumphed at the interruption. Smiles rolled his eyes for Erin's benefit. He liked the way hers twinkled back at him while the dealer patted the felt, asking for his bet.

“I'm sorry,” the dealer said to Erin, “if you're not playing, you can't be in this area.”

She plunked down a wad of hundreds. “Will that do?”

“Oh, yes, of course, ma'am,” the dealer said, recovering quickly. She slid the crisp bills through her hands and onto the velvet. “Changing two thousand!” she yelled.

“Well well well,” Smiles said.

Erin smiled at her chips as they came her way. “Blowing my savings,” she said. “I just got this for finding a number on GIMPS.”

“You what?”

Erin looked at him funny. “You're here for CRYPTCON and you don't know what GIMPS is?”

“My friend's the one at the conference. I'm just along for the ride.”

“Well, you were quite the entertainment this morning.”

So she was there after all. Smiles pushed away the thought of his mother, right there on the stage in front of him. “Yeah, well, my friend's a little eccentric,” he said.

They played out a hand—Smiles busted, Erin won—and then the dealer got busy shuffling a tower of cards. The Asian woman didn't have the patience for it; she stowed her winnings in her purse, bound for another table.

“So what's a gimp, anyway?” Smiles said.

Erin smiled. “GIMPS. It's an acronym—the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Lots of the people at the conference do it. It's just this software you put on your computer to make it search for a special kind of prime number with its spare capacity. They have rewards if your computer finds one big enough. Mine was 445 bits long.”

“Bits?”

“Digits. Digits, bits, same thing.”

“Hold on. They paid you for that?”

“Yeah.” She said it like it was totally obvious that you would get paid lots of money for finding some useless number. “The government pays big bucks for the
really
big ones. I just got a little prize from a math foundation.”

The dealer clapped her hands and showed them her palms, a magician about to do a trick. She dealt a hand and Smiles took a hit, wondering how Erin had gotten into the casino. She couldn't be twenty-one. He had used the license he got from some BU guys with an underground business making fake IDs. He'd met them out at a bar, and they gave him the license free because they'd all had such a good time that night. It happened back when Smiles was set on becoming a stand-up comedian, but the license was all he'd ever gotten from that endeavor. The name on it was Harold Bottomsworth IV.

He and Erin played out a few more hands, sitting comfortably in each other's personal space.

“So you're a huge nerd then?” Smiles said after a while. She slapped him, but her fingertips feathered against his arm as they pulled away.

“I have a complex about being into math. Half the time I'm embarrassed about it, the other half I'm pissed that people don't realize what a genius I am. Mostly the latter. I have a bit of an ego problem.”

Her voice was velvety, a half notch deeper than you'd expect from a gymnast-sized girl. The sound of it soothed him like a drug.

The casino lights played against her butterscotch hair as she turned to him. “I'm not half as smart as the other people here, really. I mean, that was just luck, obviously, my computer finding that prime. But yeah, the government will pay for the big ones because they can be valuable in all kinds of applications.”

Smiles didn't want to think about math anymore. He didn't want to think about Ben's problem, or terrorists screwing with the stock market, or Alyce Systems being rendered obsolete. He wanted to think about Erin.

“So how about you hang out with me tonight?” he heard himself saying.

The direct approach had worked pretty well so far, and she wasn't looking too put off by it now. “You'll have to work harder than that,” she said, but there was a smile on her face.

“Bet on it?” Smiles plunked a stack of black chips inside the circle. “I win, we go to dinner.”

Erin liked it. “I don't come that cheap,” she said, nodding to the rest of his stack. “All of 'em, and we'll talk.”

Smiles could see the heat seeker coming out. He'd known it since that morning: She loved being wild. He called her bluff, pushing all of his chips to the betting circle. They swallowed it up, spilling across the felt.

The dealer leveled Smiles's chips, counting the stacks off efficiently. “Betting $7,300!” she called behind her. The crowd at the rail stirred with voyeuristic pleasure. A guy in a muscle shirt edged up the stairs, looking on.

“Holy crap, you're doing it,” Erin said. When he felt her hands clench his arm, Smiles put it in the bank: However this turned out, he was getting some action tonight.

“Good luck,” the dealer said, fist-bumping the cloth for good measure.

The dealer's lightning hands shot his cards across the table. Erin hadn't put out a bet, so it was just Smiles against the house. He drew an eight and a seven, for a total of fifteen. A terrible hand, except that the dealer showed fourteen. Every idiot in the casino knew what you were supposed to do in this situation: stand on fifteen and watch the dealer bust. Smiles reached to wave the dealer off, but Erin dug her nails into his arm.

“Take a hit,” she whispered. Her breath was hot on his ear.

“I have fifteen,” he said. With all the tens in the deck—the actual tens plus all the face cards—there was a huge chance of busting if you hit fifteen. This went beyond thrill-seeking; it was suicide. But Erin just leveled her gaze.

“Take the hit.”

Smiles swallowed a potent mix of confusion and masculinity and tapped the felt.

“Hitting on fifteen, sir?” The dealer's voice was dubious. Erin nodded.

“Uh, yeah.”

Smiles normally enjoyed the deliciously nervous moment before the dealer added a card to his hand. Now he was cringing with certain doom as she swept his next card from the shoe. She flipped up a five. Smiles had twenty.

He breathed. It was like landing in a net you didn't know was there.

“Stand,” he said, before Erin could press his luck any further.

The dealer smiled and drew her own next card. Another five.

“Nineteen. Player wins.”

“Holy . . .” Smiles was numb with delight. It felt like he'd gotten away with something, all thanks to Erin. As the dealer doubled his chips, she cupped his ear and whispered more softly than before. “I'm an excellent card counter, among other things.”

Her words tingled as she pulled back and gave him a wink.
Time to firm up dinner plans
, Smiles thought as the guy in the muscle shirt appeared at the table.

“What's this?” said the dude, now right at Erin's side. He was looking back and forth between Smiles and Erin like they were giving him a hernia.

“Oh, you're here,” Erin said, suddenly off-balance. Smiles saw her eyes go timid for a half second before she collected herself. He didn't like that look on her, nor the fact that she was putting her hand on the guy's shoulder.

“This is Smiles,” she said with a head bob in his direction. “Smiles, Zach. My boyfriend.”

The way his life was going lately, Smiles almost wasn't surprised.

Zach had stringy arms poking out the sides of his gray muscle shirt. You could see, around his neck, the silver line of a ball chain that probably held dog tags. He stood an inch shorter than Erin, his most prominent feature being a tiny upturned nose. He looked like a toy poodle that's always trying to pick a fight with the Doberman down the street. How dudes like this got cool girlfriends, Smiles would never know. He watched Zach's hand curl around Erin's side and wanted to clock him.

Zach's eyes fixed on the little sign with the betting limits. “A hundred bucks a hand!?” he said to Erin. “Why are you playing
here
?”

Because it's where I am
, Smiles thought.

He didn't say it, though—he didn't want to deal with this scene. He scooped up his chips, his senses still reeling with the feel of her hand, her breath, the lively spark of their conversation even through meaningless talk about the GIMPS thing and how the government would pay you for prime numbers.

Suddenly, his hand clenched tight around his chips. Smiles knew exactly what Ben needed to do. And it was genius.

Smiles grabbed a mound of black chips and dumped them in Erin's hands. “Fun playing with you,” he said. “Now I need to ask a huge favor.”

53

MELANIE SCANNED HER
closet for something to go with her cardigan.

Her skinny jeans would be good, or the gray pencil skirt she liked so much. Would that be too dressy for the college scene, though? Her corduroy mini would be casual enough for sure. So the jeans or her mini . . . or maybe those cute capris?

She had been packing for a half hour now, and it was the first time since lunch that she hadn't been thinking about Andrei Tarasov. She'd spent the afternoon cabined in her cubicle at Alyce Systems, running Jenna's crazy news about Tarasov over and over in her mind:
Could he really have been a Russian spy? Could Alice's letter to Smiles have had something to do with that? And why would her dad be afraid to tell her about him?

The last question was the most troubling of all, and the idea of concentrating on her work—some research project on the Alyce Systems health insurance plan the Easter bunnies had given her—was laughable. With all the nervous questions boiling inside her, it was all she could do not to break her New Year's resolution to stop chewing her fingernails.

Now back at the house, with evening falling on the hushed street outside her windows, she'd found a soothing respite in the chore of packing. She made the umpteenth trip from her closet to her bed and laid her capris and yet another sweater in the suitcase.

She forced herself to stop—this was getting ridiculous. You didn't need a full bag of clothes for an overnight visit to Smith College. Melanie zipped the suitcase and settled on her comforter, cracking the window for a bit of cooling air.

Katie's so much fun
, Melanie thought, trying to trick herself into getting excited for the trip.

She and Katie had planned the visit back in the fall, when Melanie was still considering going to Smith. She had pretty much settled on Vassar by now, though, and with the Andrei Tarasov stuff unresolved, the idea of leaving for the weekend gave her a low-level panic attack. It felt like going out to a movie on the night before a test.

Alone in her room, Melanie felt the mammoth void of Smiles's absence. He hadn't called all day. Of course he hadn't—she'd slammed a door in his face not twenty-four hours ago. She checked her phone for missed calls, just to be sure. Nothing.

You can't be angry with him for not reaching out to you
, she told herself. And for the most part, she listened.

The breeze whispered into her room. It carried the early-spring smell of thawing earth, inviting her outside. Without hesitating she slipped her feet into the nearest pair of tennis shoes, picked up the Andrei Tarasov folder, and dashed off a vague-enough note to her parents. She didn't want to stop long enough to talk herself out of it. Instead she pulled the Camry out of the garage and headed straight for Boston. Newton Street would take her to the Mass Pike and from there she'd only be a half hour away.

It would be easy enough to find it. She didn't know where exactly Andrei Tarasov had lived, but the address was right there in the file beside her.