The Cipher (23 page)

191

“MEET ME FOR
lunch?”

Melanie had sent the text during physics. Jenna had a double lunch, and Melanie was hoping she would hold off and join her for the late period on the patio. It was a lot to ask of Jenna, who always seemed eager to eat as early as possible at Alyce. As usual, Melanie had found her own table out on the newly landscaped grounds behind the Kingsley Prep cafeteria; it didn't seem quite as pathetic to eat alone when you were outside.

It was mostly girls out there today, none of them seniors as far as Melanie could tell. They all wore Kingsley's tartan uniform: purple blazer, plaid skirt, gray kneesocks. The fit of their white shirts and the hang of their gold ties gave each girl a look of her own. Sun shone through the new leaves of the sugar maple trees at the edge of the patio area, which had been planted with great fanfare when Melanie was a freshman. The school had brought in some transcendentalist poet, a Kingsley alum of course, to dedicate the trees with an interminable piece about nature and education. “How Walden Grows,” he called it.
It had all sounded very Oprah to Melanie.

She put her tuna sandwich down and opened her notebook to start another list. She wrote:

What I Learned

1.

2.

3.

4.

There had to be something useful to take from her weekend . . . but Melanie wasn't sure what. The empty spaces stared up at her until she sensed something on her left.

“Good luck with that,” said Jenna, who was eyeballing the page over Melanie's shoulder.

“I know, right?” Melanie said as Jenna circled to the other side of the bench. “I thought the most humiliating episode of my life might come with some helpful insights, but I guess not.”

“So does your dad still want to kill you?”

Not the best phrasing, perhaps, considering how close Melanie had come to accusing him of actual murder. She nodded. “He is not pleased. How'd it go for you?”

“Grounded,” Jenna said casually. Her eyes followed a lanky guy dribbling a basketball over the patio, headed to the courts in the distance. “Would you look at that? No, that's wrong. He's a sophomore. That's robbing the cradle.” Jenna was talking more to herself than Melanie. “Anyway, so did you hear from Smiles? Was that some new item with him?”

“No clue,” Melanie said. “I haven't even thought about him that much since we saw him. Kinda weird.”

Jenna was working at an orange, tossing bits of peel onto the table. “So you're not going to meet that Northeastern professor?”

Melanie shook her head. “No point.”

“Well, you did take those CPR classes last year,” Jenna said. “He might be in need of your assistance any moment.”

Melanie laughed and looked at the sugar maple trees. “I'm letting it go.”

Her cell rang then, and wouldn't you know: Smiles. “I think I'm letting a lot of things go,” she said as she sent it to voice mail.

After lunch, she was going to get the “What I Learned” list out and write on the top line:
To be thankful for Jenna Brooke
.

193

SMILES STARED WITH
half-lidded eyes at the wooden timbers lining the ceiling of the master bedroom. His mind had been blown. Three days ago, on his eighteenth birthday, everything had been going so wrong. Now he'd almost made it all the way through the biggest challenge in his life, and in a few short hours he was going to come out on the other side. He was going to save Ben and his dad's company, and collect a fortune in the process. Not to mention Erin, asleep next to him, her soft breath tickling his neck. He didn't even know her three days ago.

Her eyes eased half-open, and she exhaled with the pleasant exhaustion of sleep. “Are we gassed up for the ride back?” she cooed.

The Infiniti had been low when they pulled in. “I'm on it,” he said, slipping out from underneath her. “We got a half hour. I'll be back in twenty. Think about how you want to celebrate tonight.”

“Mmmmm,” Erin said, and rolled over.

Ten minutes later he pulled into the old Squam Lake gas station where his dad had always stopped before their trips back home. The owner sat in a rocking chair outside the beaten garage door of the repair shop. He was wearing the same coveralls Smiles had seen him in a thousand times before. It was familiar here—the twenty-year-old Coke machine, the view of the inlet across the road, the peculiar mix of smells from the gas station and hamburger stand next door. Smiles couldn't help it—it reminded him of Melanie.

They used to wave to each other from the back windows of their parents' cars as they fueled up. They used to stop here together when they came up by themselves, too. Melanie had made friends with the old man who ran the place.

Smiles grabbed his phone out of his pocket. The pump clicked off behind him, his tank full. Smiles didn't bother with it yet—first he owed Melanie a call. Yeah, she had broken up with him, but they had a history. It had been a rough weekend for her—the least Smiles could do was to call and check in, offer a friendly voice.

Straight to voice mail. He thought she'd be at lunch now, but then Smiles had never really gotten a good handle on her schedule. He didn't know what to say, so he hung up. At least she'd see his effort to reach out. It gave him tremendous satisfaction as he raced back to the cabin, feeling like he'd checked a final item off his to-do list.

It was fair to say that Smiles had never been happier in his life than he was when he entered the cabin and called up to Erin, his voice filled with great expectations for the things yet to come that day.

“
Erin! Wakey wakey!
”

But Erin didn't answer. Erin didn't answer because she was gone.

197

AT FIRST SMILES
didn't feel panicked, or distressed, or terrified. What he felt most of all was
mystified
.

Fifteen minutes ago he had left her right in that bed. And now she was just . . . not there. She wasn't anywhere. He did a loop of the house, checked in every room. He'd looked in the hot tub, in the lake. She had just . . . vanished? Impossible, unless David Copperfield had dropped in and pulled a fast one while he was up at the gas station.

He wasn't even worried that the agents had decided to double up on their hostages. The thumb drive was right there in Erin's bag. They wouldn't have left without grabbing the cipher. So where did she go? It was mystifying in the extreme.

For the next ten minutes he went back through the house, racking his brain for possible explanations for Erin's disappearance. Maybe she went for a walk—girls had a thing for walks—but she knew they were supposed to get going by one thirty, and it was past that now. Maybe someone had an emergency out on the road, and Erin had gone to help? But you couldn't even hear the road from the house, much less when you were asleep. He couldn't come up with anything.

Smiles was going to have to leave without her in a minute. Standing at the top of the spiral stairs, tapping his head in frustration, he finally thought of her phone. Smiles had plugged her number into his phone when she first gave it to him. He pulled it up now, punched it, and closed his eyes.
“Please please please . . .”

A high-pitched chime sounded in his ear, and an ethereal voice said, “The number you dialed has been disconnected. Thank you for choosing AT&T.”

Smiles wanted to scream. Had he entered the number wrong? What was going on here?

He was going to be late for the exchange at the Prudential Center if he didn't get going, like, five minutes ago. But Smiles couldn't leave like this. He had fallen in love with her—he was sure of it now.

He went through the house a third time, this time opening cabinet and closet doors, as if Erin had maybe shrunk to pint-size while he'd been gone. It was ridiculous, but if he stood still his head was going to spontaneously combust.

In the guest bedroom where he and Melanie used to stay, he picked up the lantern that had been left on the bedside table. Melanie loved that thing—maybe she'd slept in this room when she'd come up to the cabin.

He plunked down the lantern and noticed, for the first time, the three old pictures lying beside it on the nightstand. He rifled through them—the first a shot of Mr. Hunt about a hundred and fifty pounds ago, wearing an embarrassingly nineties flannel shirt. He must have had a Kurt Cobain phase that Smiles didn't know about. The next was Smiles's dad in some kind of college hallway with two other men: one a younger guy with milky skin and questionable facial hair, the other an older professor type with crazed eyes. Smiles didn't know what to make of it.

The guy with the milky skin was in the last picture as well. He was chatting happily with Smiles's dad at some kind of picnic, observed by a knockout woman. She had a baby in her lap, and she was giving a steamy look to the milky-skinned guy.

Unfortunately, at some point Smiles was going to have to stop ogling the chick in the picture and try to figure out what was going on here, back in the present day. He tossed the pictures Frisbee-style onto the bed, where they landed facedown. Smiles saw some writing on the back of the last picture.

He read his mom's bubbly handwriting and almost blacked out:

Math Department Family Day—Robert with Andrei Eltsin, Darya Eltsin, and baby Benjamin.

199

A VERY STRANGE
sensation was taking over Smiles's body.

The suicide case that Melanie had told him about, the guy who had killed himself on Smiles's front lawn—his first name was Andrei, Smiles was pretty sure about that. And he had a baby named Ben. Ben Eltsin.

Slowly, heavily, a giant gear engaged in Smiles's brain. It was like the thick door of a vault being shut. And then the clicks of the wheel being spun, and then only silence. Silence, and the terrible realization that you had been locked inside.

His hands shook as he pulled the page with the phone numbers from his pocket. His ears were hot. His brain was hot. He had fallen to his knees on the hardwood floor, upright against the bed.

He tried the number for the agents.

A high-pitched chime. An otherworldly voice: “The number you dialed has been disconnected. Thank you for choosing AT&T.”

Smiles's mouth went dry.

Ben's cell had been destroyed in the casino parking lot. Smiles tried it anyway, frantic. “The number you dialed has been disconnected. Thank you for choosing AT&T.”

Oh no oh no oh no no no no no no no no
 . . .

211

OH YEAH.

The cab turned and Ben saw the first real sign of home: Mercado Rosanna, the fixture on the corner of the tiny street he'd grown up on. The painted faces of the Puerto Rican girls on the mural smiled like they were in on it, too, like they were proud of him.
You did it, Ben. You did it.
He'd done the impossible, and he could hardly believe it.

He wanted to leap out of the cab. He'd ridden over with Russell, the two of them cooped up in the taxi liked they'd been cooped up in the hotel room for the last two days. He rolled down the window to take in the scent of empanadas. The smell pulled his smile wider as the cabbie advanced up the street. Ahead, Uncle Jim burst onto the porch. He shouted into the street, giving them a grand welcome.

Ben flew out, leaving Russell to pay the fare. He bounded up the cracked steps he'd walked a thousand times, crashed into Uncle Jim, and wrapped him tight. “We did it,” he said. He said it once, and then couldn't stop until Uncle Jim pulled away and held him by the shoulders.

“I'm so proud of you,” he said. “Who'd've thought you'd pull it off, with your Asperger's and all?”

They cracked up. Ben's closest experience with Asperger's was the hours of Internet research he'd put in, reading articles and watching YouTube videos of people who actually had it. He'd faked it all, just like he'd faked coming up with the fast-factoring algorithm. Just like Uncle Jim had faked being the NSA agent Ken Gary.

“Erin and Zach are coming with the check. Let's pay this guy, get 'im out of here.”

“Yeah.” Uncle Jim waved Russell in. “C'mon, c'mon, c'mon,” he said, and ushered them upstairs to the apartment. Russell lumbered up the steps behind them. He was a friend of Uncle Jim's, and when Ben had laid out the plan, Uncle Jim had suggested Russell might make a decent candidate to play the second NSA agent, Cole. He had, but he wasn't nearly as good at poker. Ben had taken $450 off him over the last two days, which they'd spent at a downtown hotel to keep things authentic, Russell popping his cherry cough drops like candy the whole time. Uncle Jim had come back early to check on his mom, but Ben and Russell had only left the room once, on Sunday morning, to put on the show for Smiles. Other than that, it was a lot of room service, seven-card stud, and television.

But now Zach had the check in his hands. They'd gotten the call from him fifteen minutes ago. He'd just picked Erin up from Smiles's cabin—the last step of the plan, complete. There wasn't any need for appearances anymore.

They clustered giddily around the kitchen table, where Uncle Jim poured two glasses of whiskey and another of ginger ale. Uncle Jim and Ben used to sit at the table, sometimes with his mom, playing long games of gin rummy. Ben sat there and played and listened to Uncle Jim's old stories about his lawless days, never knowing exactly how true they were. And then Ben got his big idea and thought,
I wonder if he'd want to help with a really big job?

Russell shed his suit jacket and started in on his tie. “Get me out of these things,” he said, flopping them over a chair. They had been careful about maintaining their roles, and for a second Ben had to remind himself that the guy wasn't an NSA agent in real life.

Real life
.

It was a concept Ben had clung to for the long months he'd spent pretending to be someone else: a sixteen-year-old MIT student. Ben was actually eighteen in real life, just older than Smiles, but small and thin enough to pull it off. He wouldn't have to do it forever, he had told himself a million times. Someday, when Smiles believed in his character enough, and when the perfect moment came, they would pull the con. Months into the plan, Ben had tired of the role, almost lost his faith. But then the IPO came along, giving them the perfect bit of leverage to use against Smiles. When it was scheduled right after CRYPTCON—the ideal setting for their plan—Ben knew they could do it. And that, someday, he'd get back to
real life
.

Uncle Jim passed the drinks around. “All right, all right,” he said, and raised a glass. “To Ben.”

“To Ben!” they shouted, and then Ben had four hands thumping on his back.

“To you guys, too,” he sputtered.

Russell drained his whiskey and poured another. “To us, then!”

“To us!” they all said, clinking glasses.

It went on like that for a while, and Ben was soaking up every second. Real life. At some point Russell pulled out his receipts from their hotel stay and Uncle Jim tallied up his expenses. He added it to the cut they'd promised Russell, throwing in a little extra for scaring off Smiles's girlfriend. That wasn't in the script until Ben's mom called, letting them know she was snooping around.

Ben took in the old apartment: the water stains on the ceiling, the slanting floor that could make you seasick. He had hated this place for so long—thought of it as a prison—but it wasn't so bad when you weren't trapped in it anymore. Pushed up against the living room wall were the entire contents of his apartment at the Pemberton—an old mattress, the card table, the folding chair, and the desk. Ben had given Uncle Jim the keys before he left for Fox Creek.

“Souvenir?” Russell said, and tossed his NSA ID tag onto the kitchen table. Ben and Uncle Jim had made it together after some research at the library. The bar code at the bottom actually worked, but it was only good for a price check on orange juice. Making the ID had been much easier, actually, than faking the letterhead from the math journal.

Ben followed Russell to the door. “You're a pro,” Russell said on his way out. “If you don't go into retirement after this, give me a call next time you need a shill.”

The door closed behind him, and Ben turned to Uncle Jim. From behind the kitchen table, his broad smile dropped as he realized what was on Ben's mind.

“In her room?” Ben said.

Uncle Jim nodded solemnly.

“How's she doing?”

Uncle Jim gave a small shake of his head. “Same.”

Ben wished he had the check in his hands. He wanted to show her the actual thing.

She was lying in bed with more covers than the weather called for, but Ben had seen worse. He would have thought of it as a so-so day, back when he lived here. He sat on the bed and fixed the nightgown at her shoulder.

She put her hand over his. “My boy.” Her eyes were lazy with sleep, but you could see the beautiful woman that she had once been.

Ben smiled for her. “Yeah, it's me. I'm back.”

“Jim told me. You really did it, huh?”

“I really did it,” Ben said. “I did it for you. For him.”

Her mouth twisted with sentiment, and as Ben drew his hand away she held on to the lace of her nightgown. “He gave this to me, you know? He used to give me presents for no reason.”

Ben had heard her stories a thousand times each, but he never tired of them. “Yeah.”

“I'm gonna wear it till one of us wears out. Me first, probably.” Her laugh was halfhearted.

“I know it's not enough,” Ben said, “but we did it. We got 'em.”

“I know, baby.” She sat up in bed and asked for his hands. Ben gave them to her and listened. “I'm real proud of you. You're a good little man. Promise me something, though: Make this the end of it. We gotta live
now. It's time to
live
.”

“I promise, Mom.” He was okay with that—he was ready to move on, too. “But can we look at houses for you?”

“Yeah, darling. No big mansions, though.”

“No big mansions.” Ben smiled with her, and this time her laugh had something behind it.

“Go and keep Jim out of trouble. Let me get dressed here, so I can take my son for an empanada.”

Ben nodded. He didn't want to talk, because the tears were right in his throat.

They got a bunch of empanadas from Mercado Rosanna and took them up to the widow's walk in a pink plastic bag. Ben and Uncle Jim ate at the railing, their legs swinging over the roof. Ben's mom spread a blanket and hugged her knees to her chest, a bittersweet smile on her face the whole time. She wasn't eating, but Ben didn't mind; he was just glad she'd come up.

Uncle Jim had brought his whiskey upstairs. He poured another glass for himself and asked Ben for details. There weren't many more to give—Uncle Jim had been there the whole time. Ben had been feeding him daily updates ever since he moved into the Pemberton with the money Uncle Jim had fronted for the plan.

“So proud of this kid,” he said to Ben's mom.

She reached for his bottle of whiskey. “Pace yourself.” She gave Ben a wink, and he had one of those rare glimpses of the woman she must have been without the depression. It wasn't going to end today—maybe it would never end—but it filled him with joy.

“I'm proud of all those kids,” Uncle Jim said, as if he'd never been interrupted.

“Here they come,” Ben said, pointing to the edge of the parking lot below, where Erin and Zach had just appeared.

Uncle Jim stood up and crossed his arms above his head. “Oh, yeah! There they are!”

Erin saw them first. She flashed a piece of paper victoriously, then followed Zach in a sprint to the house and up to the widow's walk. Ben had found them both—Erin through his math research, Zach an old friend from grade school who had designs on being an actor. Their footsteps thundered on the stairs, and then they shot onto the roof. Uncle Jim lifted Erin off the ground and twirled her in the air.

They laughed. They grabbed up empanadas. They told stories.

Erin's piece of paper was a receipt from a Third Boston branch they'd stopped at on the way back to Boston. As planned, they'd wired the money immediately to an offshore account. “Went through while we were there,” Zach said proudly. “It's in our account now.”

“It's done,” Uncle Jim said, holding the proof in his admiring hands.

And it was. They all beamed at one another, and it was a long time before they could sit down and utter anything but nonsensical sounds of joy.

At some point Erin cracked up about something, caught up in her own laughter until she noticed them all looking on. “So we're at that
disgusting
fish place,” she explained, “and Smiles gives Zach the check. It's fifty thousand dollars short, and Marlon Brando here doesn't even say a peep.”

Uncle Jim cackled.

“What'd you want me to do?” Zach said. “Hold the whole thing up over fifty thousand dollars?”

“Of course not, but it was suspicious. You should have stayed in character. Never getting to Hollywood at this rate.” She shook her head in mock dismay. “Which reminds me,” she continued with the flush of excitement running through them all, “can someone explain to me how a guy who supposedly wears muscle shirts all the time gets a farmer's tan like that?” She pointed to the tan line well below his shoulder.

Zach looked at his arm like he was seeing it for the first time. “Yeah, well, luckily the guy's way too stupid to notice. How long did you have to ram that idea into his head at the blackjack table? Twenty minutes explaining to him about the government paying for prime numbers and he still barely got it. The guy's brain-dead.”

Ben watched Erin. She crushed her foil wrapper and stared off. Ben knew how it felt. He'd spent more time with Smiles than anybody and didn't like hearing Zach talk about him like that, either. Part of the relief of getting back to real life
was the relief of not fooling Smiles anymore. He'd never admitted to Uncle Jim how much he actually liked the guy.

He hadn't told Uncle Jim that he almost called the whole thing off at the conference. It happened in the opening session, when Smiles's birth mother had appeared at the podium. They hadn't known that was coming at all—it was the worst possible complication. As soon as he saw her, Ben knew who she was. And then he saw that horrified look on Smiles's face, and it almost was too much. Was he a mark or a friend? The question loomed in Ben's mind while the theater rang with applause, and he knew that by the time it died down he had to make a decision. The presence of his birth mother was going to absorb Smiles entirely, mess with the fine details of their plan. So he made his choice, ad-libbing on the spot, feigning the discovery that he was supposed to make later that night. Hoping that it would distract Smiles enough from his mother to salvage things. It had worked.