The Cipher

by John C. Ford

  “The other key I keep safe. It’s my private key, and I give it to no one.” He slipped the key into his pocket. “It’s the key to my front door, and whenever I want to get my secret messages, I open my door and collect them.

  “Now, I know what you’re all thinking: What is he talking about? Mail slots have been around forever!” Even Ben chuckled at that one. “Of course, the mail slot is just an analogy for the way public-key encryption works. And with the arrival of the Internet, it became infinitely more important. Amazon wouldn’t have gotten quite so far if it had to share a secret code with each of its customers before accepting credit card information from them, would it? Today, public-key cryptography protects not only billions of credit card transactions a day, but untold stores of private data.

  “And with that background, let me introduce someone far more knowledgeable on the subject: our special guest.” Some premature claps sounded from the back. “Our speaker is a brave one, and let me tell you why. At this session today, you’re going to hear about some new research. But as we know, sharing research publically in our field can be a dangerous thing. Some people tell you to Never Say Anything.”

  Peals of laughter ripped across the room, but Smiles didn’t get it. He nudged Ben.

  “The NSA,” Ben whispered. “They say it stands for Never Say Anything, ’cause they don’t want anyone spreading information about encryption. They have, like, laws against it.”

  The man had reached one end of the stage. He turned on his heels and started back. “Who are these people? It’s hard to know. Some say there’s No Such Agency.”

  Smiles had lost his curiosity, but Ben whispered anyway: “They used to deny they even existed.” More laughs were rippling across the seats. This guy was really slaying them.

  “In all seriousness,” the man said as the crowd fell obediently silent, “the consequences of speaking publicly about innovations in our field are severe. Not many scientists face jail time for merely talking about their work, but we do—those smart enough to advance the art of cryptography and brave enough to share. The speaker I’m introducing is a professor at one of our most respected universities. One of the professor’s students has done some interesting work. And the professor has courageously volunteered to present that research today—despite the risk of arrest—in order to protect that student. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Taft of the University of California at Berkeley.”

  The crowd leapt to its feet before the professor even appeared, washing the auditorium in applause. Smiles didn’t bother. The forest of bodies made him feel small, and he was left alone again with his thoughts. Smiles heard the microphone crackle and the speaker mutter a thank-you. The speaker’s voice was female, and the scrape of the microphone reminded him of static on his cell. The crowd remained standing around him, but Smiles was somewhere else entirely—back again on that phone call with his mother, her voice so smooth and firm and far away. Polite but distant. It had a high polish, a pretty piece of wood under an inch of lacquer.

  While he had talked with her on the phone, a huge gaping hunger had cracked open inside him. But her voice had said, It’s better left alone.

  She was talking about the letter, which Smiles hardly even cared about by that point. He wanted bigger answers, but there was no way to ask the questions. So he kept pressing about the letter. It’s better left alone, she repeated. Then her voice went flat: I’m getting on a plane. I’ll have to end this call now.

  And then it was over.

  The applause kept on, the crowd still on its feet. And then Ben dropped to Smiles’s side, landing heavily in his seat. He gave Smiles a strange look—thoughtful or troubled or maybe just Ben being his strange self. The clapping subsided and an air of anticipation filled the room. In front of Smiles, the wall of bodies came down in pieces.

  “Thank you,” the female voice said into the microphone, and Smiles gasped.

  That voice . . .

  He could hear it more clearly now. The man in front of Smiles sat, and that’s when he knew for sure. He had only seen a few pictures of her, but it didn’t matter. It was in the wide set of her face, the flatness of her lips, the eyes that gazed out at the crowd. She looked like him.

  Standing at the podium—he was certain of it—was his mother.

  37

  “THANK YOU VERY much for that,” she said to the final notes of applause. It was definitely her—the voice from the phone, the one he’d been unable to shake all morning.

  The screen lit up with a formula and she began her speech, but Smiles couldn’t absorb what she was saying. He could only hear the tone of her voice, the same as on the phone but now slightly more feminine, more relaxed. Smiles almost laughed. She was more comfortable risking her freedom than she’d been during a call with her son. He watched her in a trance, feeling nothing except the blood rushing to his head.

  Smiles had told Melanie he didn’t think about his mother, but of course that was a lie. He wondered about her all the time. When she’d sent the letter back unopened, it had cut him deeply. He hadn’t been eager to relive the experience, and he’d never sought her out again. He always imagined she was out of reach somehow, that she’d joined a cult, moved to a commune in Australia, taken off on a Peace Corps stint in Paraguay. Even the phone call could’ve been made from anywhere. But now she was standing in the flesh before him.

  She was playing casual to the crowd, but you could sense something rigid about her. A plain navy dress shielded her petite figure. Chunky scarlet beads circled her neck. There was something controlled about her haircut, a bob with razor-edged bangs.

  She had wrinkles at her eyes—markers of the years she’d spent away from him for no reason at all. She adjusted her dark-frame glasses and looked to the screen, pointing out some intricacy in the numbers that appeared there. Smiles watched her and felt a hot spark of anger.

  “As you see, it’s a rather elegant approach to the issue,” she was saying.

  Smiles found himself shrinking down in his seat, half expecting that everyone in the auditorium would have noticed the resemblance between them. But at his side, Ben hadn’t moved. He wasn’t even watching the stage—he still wore that troubled look, only now his eyes were roaming over the ceiling in a searching kind of fashion. Smiles was about to nudge him back to reality when Ben placed his finger flat along his nose, his concentration reaching new levels of intensity.

  And then Ben said out loud, in far more than a whisper, “It couldn’t . . .”

  People turned, curious at the interruption. On the stage Alice broke off at the small commotion. Smiles touched Ben’s arm, hoping to neutralize whatever kind of Asperger’s thing was going on, but it didn’t work at all. Ben’s eyes popped alive.

  “No way!” This time it was nearly a shout. Smiles could feel the excitement boiling from Ben’s body.

  The crowd rumbled in annoyance and the mustached man leapt onto the stage, trying to locate the source of the problem. Ben was too worked up to care. He shot straight up out of his seat. Snatching his backpack, he stormed toward the aisle as fast as he could, hurtling past laps and tripping over knees in the narrow row of seats. From their position in the center, it took an excruciatingly long time.

  Smiles wanted to scream: Hey, whatever happened to “don’t make a scene”?

  The presentation had stopped entirely now. The audience began turning on Ben, muttering at him as he twisted his way to the aisle. Some guy at the end of the row grabbed at him, citizen’s-arrest style, but Ben spun loose and flew up the stairs. His backpack flapped wildly against his side as he took the steps two at a time, banged hard into the door, and fled out into the hall.

  The air had left the room entirely.

  Smiles needed to find out what was going on before the session started up again. He cringed and ventured awkwardly down the row himself, apologizing as he made his way. “Sorry, medical emergency,” he said o
ver and over. His go-to excuse had never failed him, but this was really pushing it.

  The crowd was still recovering from Ben’s dramatic exit. Now a grumble of confusion began spreading through the auditorium as Smiles stumbled his way sidelong to the aisle.

  “Everybody, please,” the mustached man was saying. Smiles heard his voice through the speakers as he wedged past the final few seats, a tight smile pressed to his face. “We apologize for the interruption,” the man continued from the stage. “Hold it down, please, and we can continue in just a moment.”

  Before he started up the stairs, Smiles turned to the podium. His mother was staring back at him, drawn stiffer than ever.

  Smiles pushed into the hallway, not sure he had the capacity to handle Ben’s drama, whatever it was. The door swung closed behind him with a satisfying metal clack, and Smiles wondered if he would be able to shut out the memory of what he’d just seen as easily as that.

  The woman with the programs was stationed in a chair by the door, tearing through a sudoku and a bag of Cheetos. Smiles was about to ask her if she’d seen a crazed kid running from the auditorium when he spied Ben across the hall. He was sitting on the floor a short distance away, writing furiously in his notebook. Directly above him was a brass light fixture—the proverbial lightbulb over his head.

  Smiles approached gingerly. Ben suddenly seemed like some kind of wild animal that could be stirred at the slightest provocation.

  “What’s going on there, bud?” he said.

  Ben jabbed an index finger in the air, his attention fixed on the page.

  The whole episode had been pretty disturbing, but as he watched Ben writing with such concentration, Smiles had an inkling of a thought.

  “You figure something out in there?”

  Finally, Ben finished writing. His arms puddled to his sides in exhaustion. “Yeah, I did.”

  Smiles knew of only one thing that Ben was trying to figure out—one thing worthy of making such a scene. A grin creased Smiles’s face. This might not be scary at all. This might be a jackpot.

  Smiles leaned into him and said, “So tell me, how does it feel to win a million bucks?”

  He was sure Ben had solved the Riemann thing—the million-dollar question. But Ben just closed his notebook firmly. “I . . . I really shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Talk about what?” Smiles said, but Ben didn’t fall for it.

  “I can’t talk about it.” It was the bladed voice he used sometimes, mostly when he was trying to kick Smiles out of his apartment. “Actually, I need to go home.”

  “Home?” No way.

  Smiles looked up and down the hall, as if anyone else could help him reason with this guy. The space was nearly empty of conferencegoers, silent except for muffled sounds from the auditorium and the rhythmic crunch of Cheetos.

  “Look, man,” Smiles said, “I can see you’re a little freaked out by your brainstorm here. But there’s a rule, and it goes like this: When you get Smiles out of bed at six o’clock in the morning to go to Fox Creek, you go to Fox Creek. You don’t turn right around and go home.”

  Something hard set in Ben’s jaw. “You don’t understand. I’m not safe here.”

  “You’re not safe?”

  So yeah, Ben had gone full-on nutcase. Next he was going to say somebody had put a chip in his brain, and Smiles wasn’t equipped for this. He just wanted to play a little poker. Maybe the casino had an on-call shrink for problem gamblers who Smiles could get on the case. In the meantime, he figured he should stash Ben away.

  “Okay, look, let’s get you to the room.”

  He pulled Ben up from the floor and led the way to the elevators, amazed at how far awry the casino trip had gone in the span of an hour. He didn’t think it could get any stranger, but then out of nowhere Ben yanked Smiles’s shirt, dragging him into an alcove.

  Smiles wheeled on him. “Hey, this is getting weird. I don’t know what the—”

  “Shhh!” Ben hissed with crazed eyes. He peered frantically down the hallway, where a man was walking toward them from the elevators. Ben pinned Smiles in place with his scrawny arms. He whispered urgently: “Stay quiet till this guy passes, and I swear to God I’ll explain everything.”

  Ben peered out, pulled his head back again, and put a finger to his lips. Smiles felt like a tool for playing along, but he did. The man looked about as nefarious as a copier salesman. He walked down the hall in an off-the-rack suit and a buzz cut, passing the alcove without a look.

  Ben didn’t breathe until he was gone.

  “That could be the NSA guy—the one I’m supposed to meet about my paper,” he said.

  “So what?”

  “Just stay here for a sec until he’s gone.”

  “You’re scaring me, Ben. What’s this all about? I thought you won a million bucks.”

  “No, it’s bigger than that.”

  “Bigger than a million bucks?”

  Ben nodded, but he didn’t look happy about it—he looked terrified.

  “Smiles, I’ve changed the world.”

  41

  MELANIE WAS GOING to have to start bringing her own lunch.

  Every Friday, she tried to evade lunch with Jenna Brooke, and every Friday she failed. So now Melanie was sitting there in the deli, listening to yet another stream-of-consciousness rant from Jenna. This one seemed to be a cultural history of lesbianism in which their soccer coach, Ms. Fields, was playing a major role.

  It wouldn’t have grated on Melanie so much, except that she had managed to pull the old HR file on Andrei Tarasov that morning. She’d slipped into the file room during a midmorning lull and found it quickly among the old records that she had organized and boxed for shipment to the warehouse.

  She had stashed it in her new leather bag right when she got back to her cube, planning to sneak out for an early lunch and read it then. But just before Melanie could make it to the elevator for her absurdly early lunch—it was barely past eleven at the time—Jenna tracked her down and, of course, volunteered to join her. (“I’m totally craving corned beef. Let’s do it.”)

  Now Melanie could only steal longing glances at the file in her leather bag, all the while hoping that Jenna would stop talking long enough to eat her sandwich so this lunch could be over. Melanie finished her vegetable soup and cleaned up her place as conspicuously as possible.

  “. . . Chicks who get nipple piercings? They’re the new Stepford wives. Give them whatever they want, you know? Not to get like post-post-feminist about it, but—oh my God, wait, is that a new bag, Mel? It’s—so—freaking—cute . . .”

  Melanie didn’t notice the interruption in Jenna’s thoughts until it was too late. Jenna was holding Melanie’s bag over the table now (dangerously close to the dressing oozing from her Reuben sandwich), spinning it around in admiration. As Jenna fondled the leather with a ferocious envy in her eyes—to be fair, it was a great bag—Melanie could only pray that Jenna wouldn’t open it and see the Andrei Tarasov file inside.

  Which of course she promptly did.

  Melanie reached to stop her, but it was too late. Jenna was already pulling the manila folder out for inspection.

  “Heyyyyyy,” Jenna said, in a mock-naughty tone that Melanie had heard her use on numerous members of the football team. “You aren’t supposed to be taking these outside the office.”

  She was right. The point had been drilled into them on their first day.

  “Yeah. I was just going to—”

  “Oh my God! It’s that Russian dude.” Jenna had opened the file on the table now, reading intently. “Melanie, what are you doing with this?”

  “You know something about him?”

  “Know something? This is the guy they were talking about. The Russian spy!”

  The clatter of dishes, the steam from the dishwasher, the electronic pinging of the cas
h registers—all the stimuli Melanie had been aware of only a second ago faded away.

  Did Jenna just tell me that Andrei Tarasov was a Russian spy?

  And now, for the first time ever, Melanie was completely interested in what Jenna Brooke had to say.

  “Russian spy?”

  “Okay, so I’m not supposed to know anything, but I heard Chrissy and Pam talking about this guy a few weeks ago,” Jenna said.

  She was always trying to make friends with Chrissy and Pam, two employees in the HR department. They were just out of college, and they always did everything too cheerfully for Melanie’s comfort, like their happiness was a chocolate coating over a hollow inside. Melanie had given them a name in her head: the Easter bunnies.

  “Yeah?” Melanie said, and her prompting tone was all Jenna needed.

  “So this is what they said, swear to God. This guy, Tarasov”—Jenna jabbed at the folder—“he was a Russian, okay? He came here for school, ’cause he was really smart or whatever. Harvard, I think they said. Wherever Mr. Smylie was teaching.”

  “He was one of Mr. Smylie’s students?” Melanie couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

  “Yeah, yeah—it’s so freaky, right? Wait till I tell you. So this guy was in grad school at Harvard, working with these big math professors. I guess some of the math can be kind of sensitive, like top secret. ’Cause they use that advanced math for, like, nuclear weapons and codes and whatever. That’s what Chrissy was saying. Anyway, after school he got a job at Alyce. But then they found out that Tarasov had been stealing research and handing it over to the Russian government.”

  Melanie’s cell rang; she sent it to voicemail without checking the ID.

  “It’s crazy, right?” Jenna said.

  Melanie leaned forward, trying to keep Jenna’s voice down. “Was he stealing research from grad school or from Alyce?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear that well.”