The Cipher (27 page)

269

LIKE EVERYTHING IN
Back Bay, the Four Seasons on Boylston reeked of money. The sidewalk out front had been freshly hosed down, and the double doors at the front were framed with shining brass. A doorman opened them for Smiles. The woman at the reception desk beamed beside a massive bowl exploding with flowers.

His mother had said she'd be waiting in her room. It was a good thing he'd called so early—she had a morning flight, she said, and she'd be leaving for the airport soon. But yes, she would make time. She wanted to see him before going back to California. Smiles could hear, from her voice, that she didn't know yet.

He rode the elevator to the fourth floor, checking the time on his phone. It was nearing seven o'clock. In just two hours, someone would have to make that speech. Before that, Smiles would have to tell Mr. Hunt what he wanted to do about the IPO.

He found room 434 down a hallway lined with expensive wallpaper. Cream with blue stripes. Soft colors for an easy life.

Smiles could have an easy life if he wanted. He just had to turn around, give the all clear, and go to Fox Creek every weekend. A suite at Fenway. His eighteenth birthday every day, to make up for the one that had gone wrong.

He knocked on the door.

She opened it, and for a moment just took in the sight of him. She wore another smart suit, this one dark blue, her hair sleek from the shower. But there was little chill in her face this morning.

“Please,” she said, and opened her arms. Smiles found himself wanting it, and her body felt small and feathery in his arms. She dabbed at the edges of her eyes when they parted, her mascara holding up. “I'm so sorry about yesterday. I shouldn't have . . . I had no right to . . .”

“Dad died last night,” Smiles said, because there was no way to ease into it.

She nodded softly. “Yes, I see,” she said. “Thank you for coming. Thank you for telling me.” She pulled a chair out from the tiny desk in her suite. It was a French Victorian thing, fancy and proud on the outside, masking an essential fragility—more like his mother, he realized, than he ever would have thought just days ago. When she rubbed at her forehead, Smiles could see her age in the imperfections of her hand. “Would you like me to stay?” she said. “For the funeral?”

“It's not just about that,” Smiles said. “It's about something you said yesterday.”

“Robert, I was terribly—”

“No, please, we don't actually have a lot of time. Yesterday you said you wanted to run Alyce Systems with my dad. That was your plan.”

“Yes, it was.”

“So what I'm wondering is: Would you want to run it yourself?”

271

“GOOD MORNING. I
know that I'm not the person you expected to see here today.”

It was so awkward, talking into the camera with the lights in his face, the huddle of lawyers at his sides, the green screen behind him. On the monitors at the edge of his vision, he appeared before an image of the Alyce logo, the great bronze keys locking into each other. Private key and public key.

Directly in front of him, in the flesh, five hundred Alyce Systems employees crowded the lobby of the headquarters. Smiles had insisted on doing the speech there rather than the hospital. His dad was gone now. These people deserved to hear from him in person. Mr. Hunt had spent ten minutes trying to dissuade him from moving the operation, but Smiles didn't care if a few lights were askew, or if they couldn't use the biggest camera. He thought his dad would approve, and it gave him the resolve to order everyone downtown.

Now they were here, and Smiles was sweating inside a suit that one of Mr. Hunt's lawyers had procured for him on fifteen minutes' notice. He could feel the tag of the scratchy shirt digging into his forearm. Still in his tennis shoes, he stood on the X that had been duct-taped to the floor. Between him and the audience was just the thin glass podium.

Despite Mr. Hunt's protests, they'd done an amazing job setting up in under an hour. Smiles stood on a raised platform that let him see every last employee who had shown up. And if the heat of the lights in his face was any indication, those things were working just fine. He breathed and started reading from the teleprompter, where the speech one of Mr. Hunt's lackeys had written in record time scrolled slowly upward.

“I am Robert Smylie Jr., the son of Robert Smylie.” The next line on the screen said something about how the people might know his dad as a friend, mentor, or inspiration—or probably all three. Smiles couldn't make his mouth regurgitate it. Time to wing it.

“My dad passed away last night. In his sleep, peacefully, and well cared for.” Smiles felt the movement of lawyers behind him, worrying that he'd gone off script. “His death is a great loss to his loved ones and to Alyce Systems. To you, the people who actually do the work here.” He could read the stunned reaction of the employees in the too-still body language of the crowd.

“I was surprised to find out just this morning that as a result of my father's death, majority control of the company has passed to me. But don't worry, I realize how scary that may sound.” A riffle of laughter swept through the crowd. Smiles heard a clipped laugh burst from one of the lawyers behind him. At least somebody liked it. “And like I said, you do the work here, not me. I never had much to do with my dad's company, to be honest with you, and to be in control of it when others have worked so hard would feel like . . . stealing. So, as my one and only act as a shareholder, I'm doing the best thing I can to put the company in the right hands. They are the hands of a woman who was with this company from the start. It's named after her, actually. She is Alice Taft, and she'll now take over.”

Smiles pulled away from the stares of the crowd, utterly drained.

His mom passed him on her way to the podium, giving him a peck on the cheek. “Perfect,” she said.

277

MELANIE ACTUALLY TOUCHED
the screen. She thought she had been proud of him yesterday, but this was something else. She wanted to reach through and give him the biggest hug she ever had.

She'd found the webcast on the Alyce Systems website and had skipped Early European History to watch it. She thought maybe she should take her laptop over to the cubicles at the edge of the media center, because she was going to start bawling in a second. A good cry, for once.

She typed out a text:
“Beaming with pride. Be good to yourself—you're super cool, too.”

The webcast continued—Alice was stepping to the podium now—but Melanie had seen Smiles's performance and that was all she cared about. She drew the headphones off her ears, ready to disconnect from the entire saga.

On the video feed, she couldn't help noticing her father in a line of suited executives behind the podium. He'd been up all night, Melanie knew. After she'd come back from the hospital last night, she'd relayed Mr. Smylie's request to see him. It was well past midnight when he returned, but Melanie was up to hear him. She was stirring honey into a mug of tea, still restless from the day, running the scene from the bank over and over in her mind. She didn't want to believe that Mr. Smylie was a thief. She didn't want to think her dad was involved. But she knew that both of those things were true.

Her dad entered the kitchen softly and stopped at the sight of her, like a cat burglar caught off guard. Melanie pulled her robe tight across her chest. She warmed herself with a sip of tea while her dad made his exhausted approach to the kitchen table.

He grabbed the back of a chair. “Do you mind?”

Melanie dipped her head permissively, not trusting herself to engage.

He sat and folded his thick fingers through each other, elbows spread wide on the table. The sigh that preceded his confession may have been the saddest sound that Melanie had ever heard. The story came out as Melanie suspected: He'd known what Mr. Smylie had done from the beginning. He should have stopped it—or at least left Alyce—but he didn't. He put off Rose when she found out the truth. And when he read the letter that would have given Smiles access to the safe deposit box, he destroyed it himself.

“I'm just as guilty, in a way, as Robert,” he said at last. Melanie didn't disagree with him.

“Is there anything else you want to know?” her dad asked.

Melanie settled her empty tea mug on the table. “Just about Rose,” she said. She needed to hear it from him. “You didn't have any—”

“Oh no,” he said, and finally she knew it was the truth. “I'm not that far gone, Mel.”

She nodded and went up the stairs, and a few hours later the call had come about Mr. Smylie. The sound of the front door closing was the last she'd heard of him. Now, he looked tiny and uncomfortable in the corner of her monitor.

She clicked the webcast closed. There was still a half hour left in the period, but she was in no mood to fill it with homework. A thought was pushing itself forward in her mind, past her disappointment in her dad and even her pride in Smiles. After a few minutes she gave in to it, returning to the computer and pulling up the Vassar website. Just as she found the page she'd been looking for, the text response came back from Smiles:
“Think I got a j-o-b already. Gonna be responsible like Melanie Hunt. Take care, you.”

She stared dumbly at it for minutes, then turned back to the website. She was responsible, yes, she'd always be responsible. But she needed to find the other parts of herself, too, and maybe this wasn't the place to do it.

DEFERMENT PROGRAM
, the page said. Melanie clicked. Vassar could wait a year.

She spun a globe in her head and dreamed big.

In the search box, she typed: “Gap year Buenos Aires.” She pressed return, and in her mind she was already off.

281

A GROUP OF
nurses swept in, mopping the room down. A pretty black nurse folded clothes from the room's little closet. She did it carefully, slowly, like she didn't want it to end. She finally laid them quietly at the base of a cardboard box. She unplugged the mini-stereo and put that over them. The last thing to go was a picture of a bride—his mom, probably. The good one. Rose.

Pursing her lips and shaking her head, the nurse carried the box out of the room and to the front of the neuro-oncology center. Ben turned away and got a drink from the fountain, hoping to look like just another visitor. It had been easy to sneak back here, with all the comings and goings.

He stared at the bed inside the room. He'd planned to have his crowning moment right there at the foot of it. That's where Ben would have told Robert Smylie what he'd done to Smiles. Ben would say he did it for his father, Andrei Eltsin—the man Robert Smylie had cheated out of life. Ben would say he did it for his mom—whose life he had ruined as well. The swindle was the best revenge they could get. Going to the police was never an option for them, since Ben's dad left his only evidence of the theft at the Smylies' front door. Along with his blood.

It would be revenge enough to hurt Robert Smylie. To stand at the foot of his bed and tell the great man that he'd taken his money. That he'd made a fool of his son. That his mom would now live in the comfort she deserved, a small measure of her rightful fortune returned.

But Robert Smylie had stolen that moment from him as well. There was nothing in that room except a tightly made bed and a television screen, cutting live to the Alyce Systems IPO. Smiles's biological mother, Alice Taft, was up there for some reason. Ben edged to the doorway to hear it.

“The first thing I want to tell you is that the public offering will not be going forward today,” she said. “It's not appropriate in light of our founder's death, and the uncertainty in the market that could result. For those of you with stock, your shares might be undervalued if we were to go forward. What's most important is to step back and demonstrate that Alyce Systems continues to have strong leadership and a strong vision.”

Ben hunted out Smiles in the phalanx of bodies behind her. The scroll at the bottom of the screen said:
ALYCE SYSTEMS IPO
HALTED. ALICE TAFT, C
OMPANY NAMESAKE, INST
ALLED AS CEO.
Somehow, his mom had taken control of the company. But Ben saw no trace of bitterness on Smiles's face. Just the same buoyant smile he'd worn every day, hour after hour, sanding Ben's hatred thin.

There was no revenge in this world. There was only going forward.

Ben went to the reception desk and asked the pretty nurse if he could leave a note for somebody.

283

FOR TEN MINUTES,
Smiles watched his mom grab hold of the confused crowd and turn it in her direction.

That voice
, he thought. The distant voice that he could never reach—he could hear, now, that it was the voice of a leader. Smiles didn't understand half of what she was saying, but the authority she projected cut through any doubt about his decision.

They clapped for her at the end.

“Masterful,” Mr. Hunt said, shaking her hand as she led them off the podium. In the transformed mood of the lobby, employees gathered to greet her on her way out. The bodies pushed closer, and Smiles found himself turned to Mr. Hunt. Smiles nodded and made for the street—he knew the man's secret now, and it would never be the same between them.

Employees spilled from the revolving doors, then the lawyers, then the workers who'd set up the platform and all the rest of it. The lobby was emptying, the marble floor dull with shoe prints. Smiles felt sorry for the guy who had to buff it.

He stood outside the building for forty minutes, breathing the air and waiting for his mother. The huge logo shadowed him on the sidewalk. At last she came, exuding a tired energy. She cocked her head at the sight of him.

“You didn't wait for me all this time, did you?”

“I didn't mind,” he said.

“Well, thank you. That was sweet.” They had so much to say to each other, but nothing came out. In time, maybe. “So . . . when do you want to start?”

Her one condition of taking Smiles's stock and becoming CEO was that Smiles join the company, too. She had always thought Alyce Systems should have an educational program on the human side of security. Smiles would lead a team that would go to high schools, senior centers, and conferences to instruct people on being careful with passwords and avoiding Internet scams. He could make videos, too. She wanted him to make the program as big as he could. It would be
his own thing
, she said.

“How's tomorrow?” Smiles said, and she liked it. “You can find your way back to the hotel?”

“I hope so,” she said. “It's my hometown, remember?”

They couldn't exactly be at ease with each other yet, but Smiles appreciated the effort.

“I think you're going to be good at this job,” she said. She gave a small laugh then, shaking her head. “Can I tell you something? Before he nearly threw you out of the conference, the head of CRYPTCON thought you were the most charming student he'd met. He said, ‘I was sure I was talking to the student whose research you presented.'”

“Just a little off on that one,” Smiles said.

“Well, yes. Especially since that student was a girl,” she said with a wink.

A girl?