The Cipher (13 page)

The agent sighed and scribbled a number at the top of the pages Smiles had given him. He gestured to Smiles's phone. “How many people am I dealing with here?”

“Two. Just me and my associate.”

“And you'll do the calculation in seconds?”

“Seconds.”

“And then?”

“And then you'll have three hours to wire seventy-five million US dollars to a numbered account in exchange for the cipher.”

A pause. “Seventy-five million?”

“You got it,” Smiles said, and walked out.

71

TWO HOURS LATER,
they were still giddy in the casino buffet. Smiles could hardly believe it had worked.

Of course, they still had a long way to go, and of course, his plan never would have worked so well if it weren't for Ben's little touches. Like the idea for how they could demonstrate the algorithm, with Ben keeping it safe in their room. Or how Ben had told Smiles to ask for seventy-five million
US
dollars. Like they needed to clarify that. Those kinds of things, they made all the difference.

Ben got up for another pass at the dessert spread, and Smiles looked out to a craps table swarmed by a bachelorette party. A girl in a white veil tossed the dice, cheered on by friends in identical blue T-shirts (
TEAM LIZZIE
) sucking down drinks from fluorescent cups. Smiles watched them and felt a desire to call Melanie. That always happened when he felt good about something. He couldn't do it now, though. It was past eleven o'clock already, and besides, she'd just broken up with him.

Then an even stranger feeling washed over him. For a second, it paralyzed him. Actually wanting to talk to his dad—it almost knocked him out right there at the table. It was a comfortable feeling—a great feeling—but it came from such a buried place that it stopped him cold. It felt like those odd occasions when he caught a whiff of macaroni and cheese and memories of Rose, his true mom, flooded through him out of nowhere.

Smiles extracted his cell and dialed the hospital. Shanti answered the line at the neuro-oncology unit. “Hey, what are you doing there so late?” he said.

“Wrapping up a long day, darling.” He could hear her exhaustion. “How are you?”

“Not too bad. I left town for the weekend, but I was wondering if maybe my dad was still up?”

“That's sweet,” Shanti said. “I know he'd love to hear from you, but honestly he had a sort of rough one and just got to sleep.”

“Yeah, sure, okay.” He wondered if it was worse than she was letting on. But then he bantered with Shanti awhile, and Ben brought a huge slice of cake back to the table, and he felt better.

Before he hung up, Smiles took a wedge of cake that Ben offered and told Shanti, “Hey, I'm having some birthday cake after all.”

“Good, 'cause we finished yours in the break room tonight,” Shanti said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. He clicked off and dove into the cake. He and Ben grinned stupidly at each other while they demolished the red velvet.

It tasted like triumph.

She was sitting on the carpet by the door to their room. Still and defeated—like a room service tray put out for the night.

Her head hung down between her knees, her thin streaks of butterscotch hair sagging to the floor. He had given her his room number earlier, hoping that she'd ditch Zach and pay him a late-night visit. But something wasn't right here.

Smiles held Ben back. She hadn't seen them yet.

He knelt as he approached, wondering if maybe she'd just gone to sleep waiting for him.

“Erin?”

She sniffled, then slowly raised her head. Her hair fell back and he could see her face, beautiful even with the swollen red eyes that she turned to him.

“What happened?”

“Can I stay with you?”

Smiles liked the way she asked it right out—no big preamble, no need to explain herself. She'd been crying for hours, but she had steel inside her.

“Yeah, sure.” Now they wouldn't be able to go over their plans tonight. Ben would have to deal with it, though—Smiles wasn't about to turn Erin away.

Ben just stood there staring down at them, failing to pick up the social cues that 99 percent of the population would have acted on by now. “Give us a sec, huh?” Smiles said from his crouch.

“Oh, yeah, okay.”

Ben slipped into the room, and Smiles gave Erin a hand up. She had a hipster-ish messenger bag across her shoulder. You could barely see its green canvas through all the patches from jazz festivals and buttons about the virtues of biking (
REAL GI
RLS RIDE HARD
, etc. etc.). The knit shoulder strap was biting into her delicate shoulder. Smiles eased it off her and down to the floor. They stood awkwardly close to each other for a second, with Smiles feeling protective of her in a way he never did with Melanie. Melanie never needed that. She was always ten steps ahead, charting a smooth course through life while he went off the map. Without thinking he wrapped Erin in a hug. She held him tight, desperately tight, crushing the air out of him until he got a slight high from lack of oxygen.

“He's a bastard,” Erin said into his chest.

It probably wasn't right, but Smiles couldn't help thinking,
Jackpot.

“God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.”

—Paul Erdös

SATURDAY

“I think I'll go to Boston

I think I'll start a new life

I think I'll start it over

Where no one knows my name.”

—Augustana, “Boston”

73

THE FIRST HINT
of sunrise peeked through her window just after six o'clock. Melanie never needed an alarm clock to wake up, least of all today. She'd been stirring since four thirty a.m. The pale radiance against her curtains was the only excuse she needed to hop out of bed and into the shower.

When she went downstairs, her dad was standing at the kitchen island with the
Boston Globe
splayed out on the marble countertop. There was something commanding in that stance, the way he surveyed the paper from above like a battlefield map. He saw her at the edge of the room as he sipped from his coffee mug.

“Early start,” he said approvingly. “One for the road?”

“Yeah, thanks.” She dropped her suitcase but didn't bother taking off the laptop case strapped over her shoulder. She wanted to get going.

Her dad gestured to the computer as he poured her a travel mug of coffee. “You're not planning on doing work up there, are you?” He was always worried she spent too much time on homework.

“Nah,” Melanie said. “Just in case I need it for something.”

What that something might be, she didn't say. She hadn't even admitted it to herself yet.

Instead she flipped through the other paper on the counter,
The
New York Times
, and tried to savor this moment with her dad. Every morning he read the
Globe
, the
Times
, and
The Wall Street Journal
. When she was little, her favorite part of the day had been sitting on his lap at the breakfast table, feeling the comfort of his terry-cloth robe as he read the news before heading out on his important business. Last year he'd bought her a monogrammed bathrobe for Christmas. It felt adult; it felt like a new chapter in their morning tradition.

But the Andrei Tarasov story had made her question everything about her father. She didn't know what she would discover about him next, and this morning, this coffee together, didn't feel like a new chapter. It felt like an ending.

She touched the plush robe and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“Good-bye, Dad,” she said.

For an hour, she went through the motions of driving to Smith College.

Katie's expecting you
.

It's rude to break plans at the last minute
.

What if Dad found out?

The tug of guilt was just about the only thing keeping her on the Mass Pike toward Smith. And normally, guilt could make her do anything. But now it was competing with the unanswered questions about her dad. Questions about why he had kept the Tarasov suicide from her. And what it all might have to do with Alice's letter to Smiles.

She passed a sign announcing an exit in one mile. The symbols running at the bottom promised a gas station and restaurants. She had made this decision unconsciously last night, after being shooed away from Andrei Tarasov's house. But only now, as her car angled onto the off-ramp and slowly separated her from the highway, did she realize she was really going through with it.

She was just pulling off the Pike, but it struck her as a momentous event, as if she were somehow leaving the track that her life had been on for seventeen years. The Pike fell away to her left and the exit ramp rose to a desolate street running straight in both directions. The yellow line in the middle had nearly faded to nothing. It was seven o'clock in the morning, and life hadn't started here yet, wherever she was.

The red traffic light tilted in the morning breeze. It felt pointless to wait for it—like the apocalypse had come, the rules had gone out the window, and all the traffic lights and highway signs and road markings were nothing more than curiosities of a bygone age. Still, she waited at the vacant intersection for the ridiculously long light.

Melanie had never felt so alone, so untethered from her dad and Smiles and anything else that mattered. Sitting there at the empty intersection, waiting for the light, she began to cry.

Finally it clicked green. Melanie turned right arbitrarily, and through her tears saw a coffee shop down the road. The kind of place that might have free wireless. She knew what she was going to do there: search Rose's email account for any more messages about Tarasov or the mystery letter from Alice, Smiles's birth mother.

She nosed her car into a parking space. The sunrise was in full flower now, glancing off the Camry's hood in indigos and pinks. She'd never done anything this irresponsible in her life. She was going to break her plans with Katie without telling her parents or even having the first clue of where she would stay tonight. This was crazy. But the beautiful dawn assured her it would be okay.

Maybe it was just her biorhythms, or stress. Either way, she seized the delirious confidence that came over her. Her heart lifted as she got out of the car. Her cheeks dried in the wind, and she laughed out loud in the parking lot, giddy in a way that only happened when she stayed up too late or studied for ten hours straight.

The coffee shop was lonely at this hour but filled with a consoling bakery smell. They had made it cozy, with low tables and soft chairs running the length of the shop. Melanie sat down and got out her phone. She was cutting herself loose from the world, and for that moment it felt like freedom.

“Katie, I'm really sorry, but something's come up.”

79

ERIN WAS GONE.

They had stayed up late watching movies—Smiles and Erin on one bed, Ben on the other—and Smiles had a dim memory of drifting off during the climactic scene in
The Sting
, just before Robert Redford and Paul Newman tricked the fat cat from Chicago out of all his money. Smiles had seen
The Sting
before, during his movie-director phase. He hoped that he and Ben could be half as smooth as those guys in pulling off the sale of the cipher.

The sheets on Erin's side of the bed were rumpled pretty good, so Smiles figured she must have spent the night. But she hadn't woken him up or even left him a note.

Ben was toweling his hair dry in front of a mirror fogged with steam escaping from the bathroom. It was already nine thirty, and they had to get ready to do the call at eleven. So yeah, it probably wasn't such a bad thing that Erin wasn't around. Smiles had scored her phone number yesterday; he could track her down after they hit the jackpot.

“When did she leave?” Smiles asked Ben on his way to the bathroom, unable to quite get her out of his mind.

“Gone when I got up,” Ben said with a shrug. “She's really nice.”

Smiles entered the shower, recalling what Erin had told him during the movie about her fight with Zach. It was all about money. Neither of them had much of it, and Zach had made a big deal about Erin gambling at the high-limit blackjack table. She had never told him about her GIMPS money, and apparently he didn't care that she was some kind of card-counting savant. They ended up in a shouting match in their room. That's when Erin had taken off.

Smiles was lathering up with purple shampoo from the hotel bottle when Ben's comment struck him as strange. Ben and Erin hadn't talked at all last night.

“What do you mean, she's really nice?” he called out a few minutes later, applying avocado-extract shaving cream to his face at the bathroom mirror. Ben hadn't answered by the time Smiles dressed and left the bathroom, smelling better than he had in days. He made a mental note to make sure Ben took home some of the hotel's fancy grooming products.

Now, Ben was typing away at the netbook he'd programmed the cipher into. It was the computer Smiles had given him from his dad's stash. “What do you mean, she's nice?” he said again.

“Nothing,” Ben said. “We talked a little bit last night. You were asleep.”

Hmmm, odd. Ben rarely talked to anyone. He wondered what it said about Ben's mental state that he'd engaged in a conversation with a girl he didn't know in the middle of the night.

“So what'd you talk about?”

“Umm, nothing.” Ben was typing furiously now.

“You talked about something, dude.”

“Smiles, I'm trying to make sure this thing—”

“Did you tell her about Melanie?”

“Nope. I'm checking the cipher here. The numbers are going to be huge, and we don't have that much time.”

“Did you tell her about my dad?”

Smiles liked the fact that Erin didn't know his dad was Robert Smylie. Normally, he let that info slip within five minutes of meeting a hot chick. But he'd never mentioned it to Erin. It wasn't a conscious thing, but now he realized it wasn't an accident, either: He didn't want her to have a fake reason for liking him.

Still no answer from Ben. “Well, did you?”

“No, I didn't tell her about your dad, okay? Just let me finish, it's almost ten o'clock.”

“Well, what did you talk about, then?”

Ben shoved back from the netbook and looked up.

“Not much. She's nice, that's all I meant. I was getting nervous about today is all, and maybe she could tell or something. We just talked. I'm not, like, trying to take her from you.”

Smiles had to laugh at that one. Getting Ben a girlfriend was a dream, yes, but you had to start with training wheels. Not Erin. He was about to apologize for the grilling when Ben added in a dismissive voice, “We talked about the cipher.”

“You what!?”

“She's not going to tell anyone.”

“Hold on. Stop. Let me get this straight:
You told her about the cipher?
”

“I was nervous. I was starting to have a panic attack. She was awake, and really nice, and it just felt better to talk about it.” Ben couldn't play it off that easy, and he knew it. He was like a puppy giving you upturned eyes with a puddle right there, stinking up the carpet. “She's not going to say anything,” he insisted.

“Ben . . .” Smiles didn't know where to start. “What about all the paranoia? What about it being a nuclear bomb? Remember that stuff?”

“I know. I shouldn't have said anything, okay? But she's not going to do anything. She likes you. She doesn't know about our plan.”

Ben was so naive, it was incredible. Smiles couldn't believe he had to explain this to him. “Dude, she could have taken your notebook last night.”

Ben pulled it out of his bag. “It's right here.”

“She could have copied it. Did you lock your bag last night?”

“I guess not,” he said slowly. “What . . . You think she stole it?”

Smiles didn't know what he thought, except that they only had an hour to go before they tried to sell Ben's cipher, and now they had a whole new complication going on. “We've got to find her,” Smiles said. “We've got to find her and keep her with us all morning, till we get this thing done.”

“I'm sorry,” Ben said, defeated. “I shouldn't have said anything, you're right.”

“Forget it. We just gotta be smart.”

Smiles was getting out his phone to call Erin when a knock sounded at the door. He held up a warning finger to Ben. “Stay there,” he whispered.

Smiles tiptoed to the door, nervous in a way familiar to him from trips to the director's office at Kingsley Prep. This could be Ben's bad decision coming back to haunt them already.

He looked through the peephole and exhaled: Erin.

She was smiling. Too innocent to be up to anything.

When he opened the door, she was holding up a brown bag. “Went for bagels. You guys hungry?”

She walked past him into the room, plunked the bagels down on the dresser, and observed the complicated silence between Ben and Smiles. “What's the deal?”

Ben closed his netbook. “Smiles thinks you're a spy or something.”

“Forget him,” Smiles said. “Look, it's a long story, but you've gotta stick with us this morning.”