The Cipher (16 page)

103

“SMILES!” SHE YELLED.
Her arm waved for his attention.

Smiles trotted over, floating across the lobby like he was being pulled on a life preserver. In the rush of events he had almost forgotten about her. Now he had someone to get answers from—even if she did have an ass of a boyfriend, and even if that boyfriend was sitting right across from her in another muscle shirt. He drank from a gigantic cup filled with some kind of frilly drink. Strands of chocolate topping crisscrossed the foam just so.

“Hey, what happened to you?” Smiles said to Erin. “Where'd you go?”

Erin threw a cautious glance at Zach before answering. Probably smart to be careful, but Smiles was beyond that. He needed as much information as he could get.

“Ben sent me down here,” she said. “Did he ask you to come get me?”

“Come get you? No. Listen, just tell me what happened. It's really important.”

“Smiles . . .” Erin had her messenger bag over her shoulder again. She ducked under the strap, put it on her seat, and stood close enough to whisper.

“What's going on?” Zach yelped.

“Don't worry about it.” It felt good to vent his anger—especially on that guy. He wondered why Erin had even been sitting with him, after their fight the night before.

“Actually, I
am
worried about it,” Zach said.

He sounded like the kind of guy who could have done the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I routine for hours without losing interest. It was about the last thing that Smiles needed.

Erin placed a warning hand on Smiles's arm.

“Just sit there and enjoy your cocoa,” he said.

That did it. Zach's chair toppled behind him as he rose. “You want to do this?”

“I do,” Smiles said. “And yet I'm busy. Rain check?”

The other customers were noticing now, peeling their eyes from laptops and cell phones. Erin pushed Smiles gently away, extending her other arm to keep Zach at bay.

“Don't get into it with him, okay?”

Smiled edged away, far enough to talk without Zach hearing. “They took Ben this morning. I need to know what you saw.”

“They
took
him? What do you mean?”

“I mean they took him. They frog-marched him out of here. They didn't give us a dime and they took Ben and the cipher. This is real, and Ben's in trouble.”

As he said it, Smiles realized he didn't have any more time to waste. He needed to get to a phone that couldn't be traced to him immediately. The business center would do.

Erin was shaking her head, trying to absorb it. “He was so nervous this morning. He told me to—”

“I gotta call the police now,” Smiles said. “Will you be here?”

Erin looked between Smiles and Zach, struggling with the choice. “Smiles . . .”

He didn't wait for the rest of it.

He raced down the hallway, turning past the Gucci store and into the darkened nook that led to the business center. As usual, it was empty. As usual, there was something fake and pitiful about its flimsy reproduction of office life. No wonder people preferred the luxury stores. The man in the
SUCCESS
poster looked happy as ever, but this time he seemed to be mocking Smiles, ready to strike him over the head with his enormous cell phone.

Smiles grabbed some Kleenex by the coffeemaker. He used one tissue to pick up the receiver, and another to protect his finger as he dialed 911.

“Emergency services, where are you located?” A man this time, equally harried.

“I'm at the Fox Creek casino, but that's not really—”

The pounding stopped him. The door had a rectangular window set into it, and on the other side Erin was flailing away. He dropped the phone and opened the door.

“What is it?”

She paused before she spoke, breathless from effort.

“Smiles, I have the cipher. I have the only copy.”

107

“YOU HAVE THE
cipher?”

“Yeah. The only copy. If those agents took Ben, they don't have it.”

Smiles couldn't make sense of her words. “How'd
you
get it?”

Erin eyed the phone lying on the carpet. “Who were you calling?”

“911. Erin, I don't get it . . .”

He was picturing Ben, so crazy and paranoid and yet so trusting. Smiles thought he was ridiculous for keeping his bag locked up. And yet when he got scared the night before, he spilled everything to Erin. Smiles could understand why. There was something true in her honey-colored eyes, something about the scar on her cheek that said life would hurt you but it would be okay. If it turned out she had stolen Ben's algorithm, Smiles was never going to have faith in anyone again.

Erin crossed the room and hung up the phone. She returned to Smiles and took his hands. She stood upright before him in her white sundress; her hands warmed his from underneath. Stripped of her messenger bag, with a wisp of golden hair falling across her forehead, she looked like a spring bride. She was calming him down, and it was working magnificently.

“Tell me what happened,” he said. “We need to do something quick.”

“I know.” She underlined her words, letting him know she understood the urgency. It was the voice of the warm bath, the one that did everything but tuck him in bed. She drew him back to the chairs by the computer terminals.

“I didn't know what to say out there. With people around and Zach—”

“Just tell me,” Smiles said. “Forget Zach.”

Her eyes softened. She curled her fingers tight into his. “Okay, here's what happened. I was there in the room while you guys tested the cipher. When the last number didn't work, Ben flipped out. I know you were on the phone, but in person it was scary. He went nuts, Smiles.”

“I can sorta imagine,” Smiles said, thinking of Ben's display at the opening session. “He has Asperger's, you know?”

“I didn't, but yeah, I can see it,” she said. “So after you hung up, he wigged. I'm not sure if it was the fact that the last number didn't work or he was just nervous about the whole thing in general. Anyway, he stored the cipher on a thumb drive and deleted the memory from his netbook. He gave me the thumb drive and the page from his notebook and told me to go downstairs. I tried to tell him it'd be okay, to stick to your plan. But he was sure something was off, and he didn't want anybody getting that thing.”

Smiles nodded. Erin might have been thrown by Ben's actions, but they made perfect sense. Ben had it in his brain that something was going to go wrong. The kid had a stubborn way about him, and once he got something fixed in his head, it took a jackhammer to dislodge it.

“It all seemed crazy to me, but in a way I wasn't worried about it because the algorithm didn't even work.”

Smiles didn't bother correcting her for the moment. Against the wall, a printer whirred to life and began spitting out pages. The room filled with the smell of toner.

“He wanted to be a hundred percent sure things were cool before he gave anybody the algorithm. So the deal was, I was supposed to hang down here until he knew things were kosher. He was going to call me if you guys needed it for the exchange. But he never called. I wasn't really expecting him to, either, to be honest.”

“Because you thought it didn't work,” Smiles said.

“Right. Wait, what? It
did
work?”

“Yeah. The last number was just a test.”

Erin's mouth fell open. “Oh my God. A fast-factoring algorithm . . .”

“They played us,” Smiles said. “They had us the whole time. After we tested the algorithm, the NSA agent sent a text on his phone. The other agent must have been waiting for the signal. By the time I got back to the room, they'd taken him. And that room . . . you could almost feel what had happened in there. They wiped the place down with
bleach
.”

“No trace of Ben . . .” Erin said.

“Yeah. Or the agents. Who knows what they're going to do to him.” Ben was in that van right now. They were bouncing over roads and Ben was tied up in a seat, sweating it out. Probably rocking back and forth with worry. No one in the world knew where he was except those two agents. No one even knew he was in trouble except Smiles and Erin.

“I convinced him to do it,” Smiles said. The confession felt good, and then it poured out of him. “I thought I had this great plan, which now seems like the stupidest thing in the world. I don't know if Ben even wanted to do it. I kind of forced it on him.”

He leaned back, but Erin locked her fingers around his. “You guys did it together.”

Smiles shook his head. He didn't want her to make this easy on him. He'd happily take that from anyone else—Melanie made things easy on him all the time—but not Erin. “You don't know about me, but I'm actually a pretty major screwup—”

“Smiles, shut up for a second, okay?” She gave him a crooked smile. “I've gotta tell you something. I'm actually the screwup here.” The printer shut off behind her. Only after it wheezed to a halt did he notice the absence of the sound. The room was fresh with silence.

“I know who you are,” Erin said.

Smiles blinked. “Like, metaphysically?”

“I know you're Robert Smylie's son.”

“What? How did you—”

“Zach figured it out.” She shrugged, sorry to even say the name. Smiles was sorry, too. He was done thinking about that guy. “He looks stupid, but he's not. I actually met him at the University of Maine. I was taking a class on linear algebra that they don't have at my high school. He was this macho ROTC guy, seemed like the only normal human there.” She shook her head, getting back on track. “Anyway, he's been a nut about Alyce Systems for a long time, even before all the IPO stuff. He's read your dad's business book, like, five times.”

Smiles had a copy somewhere. It was called
The Transparent Innovator
, all about how good values and clean living lead to business breakthroughs. His dad's desk was on the cover of that thing, too. Smiles remembered now: His copy had gotten ruined when somebody left a cold beer sitting on it all afternoon.

“You know how the book has those pictures in the middle of it?”

Smiles shook his head. “I've never opened it.”

“Anyway, there are pictures of your dad starting Alyce in his garage and stuff. Family pictures, too. You're in a couple of them. Zach thought he recognized you from them. He searched on the Internet last night and found some Facebook pictures of you. So he knows.”

“Okay, fine, it's not important—”

“Hold on, that's not the worst part.” Her head sank. Smiles wasn't sure he had the patience for this. “Zach found me at Starbucks this morning. And I guess we started to make up. I mean, you were really sweet last night, but I didn't even know if I'd see—”

“It's okay.”

“Smiles, I told him about the cipher. I thought it didn't work. I didn't say all that much, though.” She was pleading with him. “I just said these guys thought they'd discovered a fast-factoring algorithm but it turned out to be a bust.”

“Look, it's fine. Forget that. What are we gonna do about Ben?”

She nodded, pulling his hands onto her lap. “This is what I'm thinking. For one, we could go to the police—call 911 like you were doing. But aren't you afraid of that? I mean, do you know how powerful the NSA is? They're going to deny it, and would the police really believe your story over two federal agents?”

“Yeah.” Smiles had been thinking the same thing. And there was another reason he couldn't go to the police, too—one he hadn't thought of earlier. “There's no way I can take this to anybody. If it gets out that there's a fast-factoring algorithm, my dad's whole company is in jeopardy. Especially right now, right before the IPO.” It hit him like a bar of lead.

“True,” Erin said. She tapped her fingernail against a front tooth. “I keep going back to that bleach. They were getting rid of evidence. They're calculated, and they must be worried about you. It's almost like when Ben turns up missing . . . they'll want you to get the blame.”

Smiles hadn't even considered that. The guy at the desk had seen them register together. And there were probably cameras all over the hotel and casino.

“So what do I do?” He was really asking. He knew Erin was way smarter than him. Melanie was smarter than him, too, but only in the sense that she could ace some history test that Smiles didn't care about. There was something savvy about Erin—something that let her see life like a chessboard. The way Smiles wanted to be when he thought of himself in that
SUCCESS
poster.

“Smiles, tell me why you wanted to sell that cipher.”

For a second, the answer didn't come to him.

“It couldn't have been the money, right? You must have tons of money.”

“Probably not as much as you think,” Smiles said. “But . . . no. I guess you're right. That's not exactly it.”

“So why then?” Her voice was soft but weighted with meaning. It slipped from her lips to his ears. It went inside his head and pulled the answer out with it.

Smiles said it as best he could. “I've never done anything important in my life. I've never done a single thing that matters. This felt like it mattered a lot.”

She was grinning when he looked back up at her. “Yeah, that makes sense. Smiles, it might be risky, but I think there's a way out of all this for you.”

“Tell me.”

“We sell it to them again,” she said. “And this time we don't just get the money back. We get the money and Ben.”

Something swelled inside Smiles. “Yeah? Will you help me? Are you up for it?”

“You know I am.” She was saying something more, and it made his imagination dance.

“If we do this, we have to stick together,” he said. “We have to stay together every second till it's done.”

“We will.”

Smiles couldn't have held himself back if he'd wanted to. But he didn't want to, and neither did Erin. In one graceful hop she was in his chair. The lightness of her body fell into his, her laugh soared high in the air, her hair tickled his neck.

Their lips met with a wild energy.