The Cipher (11 page)

59

SMILES WAS SO
jacked up, he could hardly stand it. He pounded on the door to the room, forgetting for a second that he had his card key in his back pocket.

Ben arrived at the other side before he could fish it out. The poor guy looked the same as when Smiles had left hours ago, only with bed head and darker circles under his eyes. His army bag was slung over his shoulder, padlocked for safety, of course. The copious books inside made sharp angles against the green fabric. Ben looked like one of those ants that can miraculously carry fifty times their own body weight.

“Dude, problem solved,” Smiles said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Where are you going? You're not leaving or anything.”

“No,” Ben said, a little testily. “You won't let me. I was just going down to Starbucks.”

“Excellent. So listen, I've got a plan. I'll tell you on the way.”

This crazy energy had been racing through him from the instant it hit him at the blackjack table. He'd been going full tilt ever since—it was the most productive day he'd had in years.

Smiles walked in step with Ben down the hall, considering for the first time how to broach this. His idea was genius, no doubt about that. But Ben was a prickly one, and Smiles didn't want him rejecting it just because he was in a bad mood.

At the elevators, Smiles punched the down button furiously. “You're gonna love this. I swear to God, I feel as smart as you right now.” And he did. He really did.

Ben looked around. “Fine, but you can't talk about . . . you know . . . out in the open like this.”

Smiles nodded. It was a fair point, and he didn't want the little guy getting his hackles up. Another guest approached as the elevator opened; they rode down to the casino level with no sound between them except the murmur of the elevator pulleys.

The doors parted to reveal a huge group of CRYPTCON nerds wearing their orange lanyards and deciding where to go for dinner. Some bald guy was yelling about a craving for Chinese. He could barely compete with the earsplitting jangle coming from the casino behind them. It sounded like the slot machines were hyperventilating.

The Starbucks was in sight, away from the casino, but it teemed with over-caffeinated gamblers. Smiles held Ben back. “You're right, we're gonna need some privacy for this.” He took a second to get his bearings, then pulled a one-eighty toward a long hallway of shops. “The business center. C'mon.”

Ben huffed and followed him.

Smiles had spent a healthy part of the afternoon at the business center, and it had been completely empty. The ringing of the slot machines faded as he retraced his steps from earlier—halfway down the row of shops to Fox Creek's bare-bones “Business Suite,” a windowless room with a fax machine, copier, and desktop computers for hotel guests. Smiles dipped his card key into the lock and entered.

Just like earlier, the room was barren. Ben followed Smiles in, still sulking, and dropped into one of the plastic chairs. Smiles made sure the door was closed before joining him by the computers. “Cheer up, man. I got it all figured out.”

“Smiles, let's just get a coffee,” Ben said. “There's nothing to figure out. You can't, like, fix this.”

“No, no, that's where you're wrong. Look, you've been totally freaked out, and I can see why. You've got this dangerous thing, and you don't want it getting into the wrong hands, right?”

Ben nodded unenthusiastically.

“Just listen,” Smiles said. “Tell me: Why don't you just give the thing to the government?”

Ben sparked to life at that. “'Cause then they'd know I have it, Smiles. That makes me dangerous, too. Who knows what they'd do to me?”

“Right,” Smiles said quickly, and he could see that Ben was surprised he'd thought it out even this far. Ben probably thought Smiles's big idea was just handing his algorithm over to the government, but it was so much better than that. “Look, here's what you're going to do. You
are
going to give the government your algorithm. But you're going to do it anonymously—through me. They'll never even know who you are. And you're not just going to give it to them, Ben. You're going to
sell
it to them.”

Selling it—that was the revelation Smiles had had at the blackjack table. It had come to him after listening to Erin talk about how the government would pay big bucks for just one stupid prime number. It was all upside: Ben would get paid, and he wouldn't have the entire weight of his discovery on his shoulders for the rest of his life. And if Smiles helped Ben pull it off, it would only be fair for him to get a taste of the action. It would be
his own way
.

And they wouldn't have to worry about it messing with Alyce Systems, either. The government knew how to keep this kind of stuff secret. That's what the guy at the microphone had said that morning—the NSA was like a black hole, keeping as much information about encryption to itself as possible.

If they pulled it off, the payday could be huge. The Clay Institute was putting up $1 million for a solution to the Riemann Hypothesis, and Ben's discovery was way more valuable than that. Smiles had done some research and found more than one organization offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who discovered a really large prime number. That much for a single prime number, and Ben had the key to all of them! Plus, those organizations didn't have the resources of the government, which had offered $25 million for Osama bin Laden.

So yeah, if they did this right, Ben was in for a payday. And Smiles could save his dad's company from becoming obsolete.

He felt like the businessman in the generic poster on the wall, celebrating some executive triumph with a fist raised in the air. The actual dude in the poster was probably just an out-of-work actor. His suit didn't fit and his cell phone was the size of a brick. Still, the poster said
SUCCESS
, and Smiles felt it in his bones.

Ben had that look he got when he turned inward, thinking furiously, twirling the mighty gears of his brain. Still, he wasn't rejecting the idea outright. Smiles leaned in for the kill.

“It's perfect, right? We put your algorithm in safe hands, we keep you anonymous, and we get you paid. You totally deserve it. I mean, you started this whole thing trying to get that million-dollar prize, right?”

Ben's shoulders lifted and fell. Smiles counted it as a yes.

“The point is, you've made this incredible discovery, and you deserve something for it. And selling it to the government is the best way to keep it safe. To keep
you
safe, too.”

“Smiles . . . your plan . . . it wouldn't exactly be a simple thing to do. They're going to be able to figure out who I am.”

“No, listen, I've thought about this.” And the crazy thing was, he had. It was amazing how far ahead he'd been thinking today. “Here's what's gonna happen. You're supposed to meet with those NASA guys—”

“
NSA
guys. They aren't astronauts.”

“Right. But you're supposed to give them your article, right?”

“Yeah, tonight. At the student reception.” Ben checked his watch. “But it's in twenty minutes and I don't even want to go anymore.”

“Forget that for a second. Look, I'm going to do the hard part. I'm going to set up a meeting with them tomorrow to prove your algorithm is the real deal. I've already reserved a separate hotel room for that.”

That was the favor he'd asked of Erin: to reserve a room under her fake ID. If Smiles had been less careful, he might have put it under Harold Bottomsworth IV, but there was always the possibility they could trace that back to him. He couldn't explain what it was all about, but she was cool with it—she seemed to like the intrigue.

Ben chewed it over. “But where would we even put the money? They can trace that, too, you know.”

This was Smiles's trump card. Mr. Hunt had told him once how easy it was to set up a Swiss bank account. He said you could do it with one ten-minute phone call. It actually hadn't been that easy. Smiles had spent two hours on the Internet and had to call the Credit Suisse information line three different times, but he'd gotten it done.

“It's a numbered account. Untraceable.” He flashed a scrap of paper with the account details he'd scrawled down earlier and waggled his eyebrows. “Whaddaya think?”

Ben cracked a few knuckles on his left hand. The popping sounds came sharp but hollow through the white noise of the room. He needed one final push before he caved.

“Think about when you were trying to solve that problem,” Smiles said. “What did you want that money for? Why was it so important to you?”

A long moment lingered before Ben replied. When he did, he spoke so softly, Smiles could barely hear him.

“I just wanted to be great at math.”

A sheen of moisture had covered Ben's eyes. You didn't cry about wanting to be great at math. No, there was
a different reason he'd wanted that money. A sensitive one.

Smiles was grasping for a new angle on the situation when Ben looked him in the eye. “You were serious before, about that being your mom?”

“Uh, yeah.” Not exactly the topic Smiles wanted to explore at the moment.

“Why'd she leave you?”

Ben looked too interested in all this to shrug him off. “I don't know, really. I mailed her a letter when I was little, and she sent it back unopened. After that I pretty much wrote her off—just kind of blocked it out. I used to get the drift that she was, like, disturbed, but I don't even know where I got that from. My dad never talks about her. It's one of those things that you just sort of know is off-limits.”

It was painful, but it wasn't hard to tell Ben any of this. Maybe his mother meant less to him now that he'd seen her. He didn't have to wonder anymore; he could just be mad.

“My mom's disturbed,” Ben said out of nowhere, and now the tears were thicker in his eyes.

“Yeah?”

“Or depressed, I guess. Stays in her bed, doesn't really eat. Like that, you know?”

Smiles didn't have much experience with depression, but he nodded anyway.

“She's in Boston?” Smiles didn't even know. He was suddenly overpowered by guilt. The truth was, he'd lost touch with most of his friends from Kingsley since getting kicked out, and Ben was probably his closest friend in the world. Maybe that was why it was easy to talk to him about his own mother.

Ben was nodding. “I didn't want to leave home, but they said I should go. Her and my uncle Jim. He's not actually my uncle, he's just a friend of hers who's around all the time. He looks after her pretty good.”

Ben was playing with his thumbs, a confessional mood thick in the room. Smiles felt a little sacrilegious to be wondering how to turn the conversation back to his plan. He decided he might have to ride this therapy session out.

“So she's always been like that?” he asked.

“Not always, no.”

The words came sharp from Ben's mouth, and right away Smiles knew he'd asked the wrong question. Something painful had happened to Ben's mom, and Smiles had stuck his finger straight into the wound. Ben's face colored at the memory. His chest heaved below the loose folds of his shirt.

Ben turned to him and said, “Ask for seventy-five million.”

Smiles put his hand out, and they shook.

“Let's go,” he said. “We've got some work to do before that reception.”

61

MELANIE FOUND IT
on the frayed edges of Jamaica Plain, on a short street near Egleston Square that had stubbornly resisted the hipster invasion taking over the neighborhood. Her GPS had directed her past a vegan bakery and no fewer than three wine bars on her way to the address in Tarasov's file. It sat in a depressing line of neglected homes, squeezed uncomfortably close together in a block-long pageant of chipped paint and warped siding.

Melanie passed the address slowly and pulled a U-turn at the end of the street. She stopped well short of Tarasov's address, across from a Spanish-language market with a bright green mural running along its side. The smiles of the Puerto Rican girls on the brickwork offered the only bit of cheer on the street. Melanie sat for a moment, drawing strength from their happy faces.

Her nerves were pointless, in all likelihood. Tarasov had been dead for more than fifteen years, and his HR file mentioned no family. The chances she would find anything of use here were slim indeed, but if she was going to learn anything about the message to Smiles, she needed a starting point. This was the only one she had. Maybe Tarasov had a roommate who stayed on. Maybe a neighbor would remember him.

A boy who could barely reach the pedals of his ten-speed swerved a drunken path down the street. She waited for him to pass before getting out and walking the sidewalk toward Tarasov's house. She chose the opposite side of the street, marking off each postage-stamp lawn in a matter of steps. The close quarters of the street suffocated her—Melanie could hear cooking sounds and the wail of a baby as she passed the houses one by one.

Tarasov's house looked like the others. Two stories tall with a deep front porch, it might have been majestic once. But now the porch bowed and its blue color had muddied with age. A severe crack split the concrete steps out front. The gap it left yawned wide and dark.

Directly across from it now, she noticed a set of wooden steps constructed at the side of the house. They led to a porch on the roof—a widow's walk, they called those things—with a gap-toothed wooden railing at its edge.

Melanie took a deep breath, drawing in the smell of empanadas, and stepped forward. She crossed the street and navigated the ruptured steps to the front door, which had a call box with two buzzers underneath. The house had been split into apartments, she realized, one for each level. Underneath the second buzzer, someone had taped a strip of paper with the resident's name. The print had faded to obscurity long ago, but the name wasn't long enough to be “Tarasov” anyway.

Melanie didn't remember an apartment number being in the file, and her confidence faltered. Before it could fail her entirely, she pressed the first buzzer and waited. When no answer came, she pressed the second. A Hispanic woman bumped a grocery cart noisily over the sidewalk behind Melanie, who closed her eyes and hoped she didn't look suspicious. She breathed and tried each one again, hearing the electronic sound seep out through the thin walls of the house. Still no answer.

Fidgety and exposed on the porch, Melanie waited just a few more seconds before giving up. She crossed quickly to the other side of the street—hoping to get away from her failure as quickly as possible—and jogged a few steps for momentum back to her car. She took a last look back at the house and slowed, caught up by the sight of an older woman on the widow's walk, smoking a cigarette. She wore a shabby housedress but stood erect, surveying the street like a lost kingdom. Melanie flinched when the woman's eyes landed on her.

Melanie hadn't been doing anything wrong, or illegal anyway, but the weathered face of the woman made her feel like it. She stared down bitterly from the height of the roof.
“Go on!”
she yelled.

Melanie ducked her head and hurried to her car. She locked the doors as soon as she got inside, then checked herself in the rearview mirror. Her cheeks had blossomed red, and a strand of hair had slicked to her perspiring neck. As soon as her head stopped thrumming, Melanie berated herself for letting the old bat get to her like that.

Before starting up the car, she checked Andrei Tarasov's house a final time. The woman was gone, the house unlit against the darkening sky, and suddenly the entire weird episode began to feel like a dream.

She had just turned the ignition when somebody tapped on her window. The knock was light enough, but it struck the window right by her ear and she nearly jumped out of her seat. Gathering herself, she turned to see a pale, doughy man sink to a squat outside her car. He did a little rolling motion, asking her to put the window down, and Melanie was too off guard to refuse. His face didn't look too threatening, anyway.

“Hi there,” he said.

“Yes, hello, can I help you?”

“Mind me asking what you were doing up at that house?” The man shifted, placing himself between Melanie and Andrei Tarasov's place. “Don't look up there, okay? Just look at me.”

Melanie didn't answer right away—she wasn't about to tell a stranger her business, even if he was a cop. That's what he seemed like, anyway. The way he assumed authority over the conversation.

“Excuse me, but who are you, sir?”

As a rule, she avoided confrontation at all costs, so throwing it back at him like that made Melanie's stomach turn. Still, she knew it was the right thing—if he could have seen it, her dad would have been proud. Next he would have told her to get the hell out of there.

Melanie didn't do that yet. Whatever he was, the guy didn't seem physically dangerous. She could smell cherry cough drops on his breath.

“Miss, I am the man who has been conducting surveillance on that house for quite some time. And whether you know it or not, your presence here is jeopardizing a very long and expensive investigation.” He flashed open his nylon jacket. Inside, a badge dangled from his neck.

“Investigation?”

He forced a smile across his lips (fake factor: off the charts), and a blue vein at his temple throbbed under the pressure. It contrasted sharply with his sickly white coloring. “I don't have a lot of time to be out in the street here, okay? You look like a nice young lady, in the wrong place at the wrong time, so I'm trying to handle this the simplest way I can here. But I do need to know if you have any more business at that house.”

Melanie desperately wanted to know if this investigation had anything to do with Andrei Tarasov. At the same time, that seemed unlikely—and maybe she was fouling up some kind of drug sting. She hardly needed to be caught in the middle of something like that.

“No, officer, I was just on my way.”

“And you're not coming back?”

Melanie shook her head and put the car in drive. The man patted the side of the car as he left, keeping his back to Tarasov's house the whole time. Melanie couldn't get to the highway fast enough. This was officially the dumbest idea she had ever had.

She wasn't ready to give up her investigation yet, though—she just needed to be smarter about it.