The Cipher

by John C. Ford

  Ben’s shoulders lifted and fell. Smiles counted it as a yes.

  “The point is, you’ve made this incredible discovery, and you deserve something for it. And selling it to the government is the best way to keep it safe. To keep you safe, too.”

  “Smiles . . . your plan . . . it wouldn’t exactly be a simple thing to do. They’re going to be able to figure out who I am.”

  “No, listen, I’ve thought about this.” And the crazy thing was, he had. It was amazing how far ahead he’d been thinking today. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re supposed to meet with those NASA guys—”

  “NSA guys. They aren’t astronauts.”

  “Right. But you’re supposed to give them your article, right?”

  “Yeah, tonight. At the student reception.” Ben checked his watch. “But it’s in twenty minutes and I don’t even want to go anymore.”

  “Forget that for a second. Look, I’m going to do the hard part. I’m going to set up a meeting with them tomorrow to prove your algorithm is the real deal. I’ve already reserved a separate hotel room for that.”

  That was the favor he’d asked of Erin: to reserve a room under her fake ID. If Smiles had been less careful, he might have put it under Harold Bottomsworth IV, but there was always the possibility they could trace that back to him. He couldn’t explain what it was all about, but she was cool with it—she seemed to like the intrigue.

  Ben chewed it over. “But where would we even put the money? They can trace that, too, you know.”

  This was Smiles’s trump card. Mr. Hunt had told him once how easy it was to set up a Swiss bank account. He said you could do it with one ten-minute phone call. It actually hadn’t been that easy. Smiles had spent two hours on the Internet and had to call the Credit Suisse information line three different times, but he’d gotten it done.

  “It’s a numbered account. Untraceable.” He flashed a scrap of paper with the account details he’d scrawled down earlier and waggled his eyebrows. “Whaddaya think?”

  Ben cracked a few knuckles on his left hand. The popping sounds came sharp but hollow through the white noise of the room. He needed one final push before he caved.

  “Think about when you were trying to solve that problem,” Smiles said. “What did you want that money for? Why was it so important to you?”

  A long moment lingered before Ben replied. When he did, he spoke so softly, Smiles could barely hear him.

  “I just wanted to be great at math.”

  A sheen of moisture had covered Ben’s eyes. You didn’t cry about wanting to be great at math. No, there was a different reason he’d wanted that money. A sensitive one.

  Smiles was grasping for a new angle on the situation when Ben looked him in the eye. “You were serious before, about that being your mom?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Not exactly the topic Smiles wanted to explore at the moment.

  “Why’d she leave you?”

  Ben looked too interested in all this to shrug him off. “I don’t know, really. I mailed her a letter when I was little, and she sent it back unopened. After that I pretty much wrote her off—just kind of blocked it out. I used to get the drift that she was, like, disturbed, but I don’t even know where I got that from. My dad never talks about her. It’s one of those things that you just sort of know is off-limits.”

  It was painful, but it wasn’t hard to tell Ben any of this. Maybe his mother meant less to him now that he’d seen her. He didn’t have to wonder anymore; he could just be mad.

  “My mom’s disturbed,” Ben said out of nowhere, and now the tears were thicker in his eyes.

  “Yeah?”

  “Or depressed, I guess. Stays in her bed, doesn’t really eat. Like that, you know?”

  Smiles didn’t have much experience with depression, but he nodded anyway.

  “She’s in Boston?” Smiles didn’t even know. He was suddenly overpowered by guilt. The truth was, he’d lost touch with most of his friends from Kingsley since getting kicked out, and Ben was probably his closest friend in the world. Maybe that was why it was easy to talk to him about his own mother.

  Ben was nodding. “I didn’t want to leave home, but they said I should go. Her and my uncle Jim. He’s not actually my uncle, he’s just a friend of hers who’s around all the time. He looks after her pretty good.”

  Ben was playing with his thumbs, a confessional mood thick in the room. Smiles felt a little sacrilegious to be wondering how to turn the conversation back to his plan. He decided he might have to ride this therapy session out.

  “So she’s always been like that?” he asked.

  “Not always, no.”

  The words came sharp from Ben’s mouth, and right away Smiles knew he’d asked the wrong question. Something painful had happened to Ben’s mom, and Smiles had stuck his finger straight into the wound. Ben’s face colored at the memory. His chest heaved below the loose folds of his shirt.

  Ben turned to him and said, “Ask for seventy-five million.”

  Smiles put his hand out, and they shook.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ve got some work to do before that reception.”

  61

  MELANIE FOUND IT on the frayed edges of Jamaica Plain, on a short street near Egleston Square that had stubbornly resisted the hipster invasion taking over the neighborhood. Her GPS had directed her past a vegan bakery and no fewer than three wine bars on her way to the address in Tarasov’s file. It sat in a depressing line of neglected homes, squeezed uncomfortably close together in a block-long pageant of chipped paint and warped siding.

  Melanie passed the address slowly and pulled a U-turn at the end of the street. She stopped well short of Tarasov’s address, across from a Spanish-language market with a bright green mural running along its side. The smiles of the Puerto Rican girls on the brickwork offered the only bit of cheer on the street. Melanie sat for a moment, drawing strength from their happy faces.

  Her nerves were pointless, in all likelihood. Tarasov had been dead for more than fifteen years, and his HR file mentioned no family. The chances she would find anything of use here were slim indeed, but if she was going to learn anything about the message to Smiles, she needed a starting point. This was the only one she had. Maybe Tarasov had a roommate who stayed on. Maybe a neighbor would remember him.

  A boy who could barely reach the pedals of his ten-speed swerved a drunken path down the street. She waited for him to pass before getting out and walking the sidewalk toward Tarasov’s house. She chose the opposite side of the street, marking off each postage-stamp lawn in a matter of steps. The close quarters of the street suffocated her—Melanie could hear cooking sounds and the wail of a baby as she passed the houses one by one.

  Tarasov’s house looked like the others. Two stories tall with a deep front porch, it might have been majestic once. But now the porch bowed and its blue color had muddied with age. A severe crack split the concrete steps out front. The gap it left yawned wide and dark.

  Directly across from it now, she noticed a set of wooden steps constructed at the side of the house. They led to a porch on the roof—a widow’s walk, they called those things—with a gap-toothed wooden railing at its edge.

  Melanie took a deep breath, drawing in the smell of empanadas, and stepped forward. She crossed the street and navigated the ruptured steps to the front door, which had a call box with two buzzers underneath. The house had been split into apartments, she realized, one for each level. Underneath the second buzzer, someone had taped a strip of paper with the resident’s name. The print had faded to obscurity long ago, but the name wasn’t long enough to be “Tarasov” anyway.

  Melanie didn’t remember an apartment number being in the file, and her confidence faltered. Before it could fail her entirely, she pressed the first buzzer and waited. When no answer came, she pressed the second. A Hispanic woman bumped a grocery car
t noisily over the sidewalk behind Melanie, who closed her eyes and hoped she didn’t look suspicious. She breathed and tried each one again, hearing the electronic sound seep out through the thin walls of the house. Still no answer.

  Fidgety and exposed on the porch, Melanie waited just a few more seconds before giving up. She crossed quickly to the other side of the street—hoping to get away from her failure as quickly as possible—and jogged a few steps for momentum back to her car. She took a last look back at the house and slowed, caught up by the sight of an older woman on the widow’s walk, smoking a cigarette. She wore a shabby housedress but stood erect, surveying the street like a lost kingdom. Melanie flinched when the woman’s eyes landed on her.

  Melanie hadn’t been doing anything wrong, or illegal anyway, but the weathered face of the woman made her feel like it. She stared down bitterly from the height of the roof. “Go on!” she yelled.

  Melanie ducked her head and hurried to her car. She locked the doors as soon as she got inside, then checked herself in the rearview mirror. Her cheeks had blossomed red, and a strand of hair had slicked to her perspiring neck. As soon as her head stopped thrumming, Melanie berated herself for letting the old bat get to her like that.

  Before starting up the car, she checked Andrei Tarasov’s house a final time. The woman was gone, the house unlit against the darkening sky, and suddenly the entire weird episode began to feel like a dream.

  She had just turned the ignition when somebody tapped on her window. The knock was light enough, but it struck the window right by her ear and she nearly jumped out of her seat. Gathering herself, she turned to see a pale, doughy man sink to a squat outside her car. He did a little rolling motion, asking her to put the window down, and Melanie was too off guard to refuse. His face didn’t look too threatening, anyway.

  “Hi there,” he said.

  “Yes, hello, can I help you?”

  “Mind me asking what you were doing up at that house?” The man shifted, placing himself between Melanie and Andrei Tarasov’s place. “Don’t look up there, okay? Just look at me.”

  Melanie didn’t answer right away—she wasn’t about to tell a stranger her business, even if he was a cop. That’s what he seemed like, anyway. The way he assumed authority over the conversation.

  “Excuse me, but who are you, sir?”

  As a rule, she avoided confrontation at all costs, so throwing it back at him like that made Melanie’s stomach turn. Still, she knew it was the right thing—if he could have seen it, her dad would have been proud. Next he would have told her to get the hell out of there.

  Melanie didn’t do that yet. Whatever he was, the guy didn’t seem physically dangerous. She could smell cherry cough drops on his breath.

  “Miss, I am the man who has been conducting surveillance on that house for quite some time. And whether you know it or not, your presence here is jeopardizing a very long and expensive investigation.” He flashed open his nylon jacket. Inside, a badge dangled from his neck.

  “Investigation?”

  He forced a smile across his lips (fake factor: off the charts), and a blue vein at his temple throbbed under the pressure. It contrasted sharply with his sickly white coloring. “I don’t have a lot of time to be out in the street here, okay? You look like a nice young lady, in the wrong place at the wrong time, so I’m trying to handle this the simplest way I can here. But I do need to know if you have any more business at that house.”

  Melanie desperately wanted to know if this investigation had anything to do with Andrei Tarasov. At the same time, that seemed unlikely—and maybe she was fouling up some kind of drug sting. She hardly needed to be caught in the middle of something like that.

  “No, officer, I was just on my way.”

  “And you’re not coming back?”

  Melanie shook her head and put the car in drive. The man patted the side of the car as he left, keeping his back to Tarasov’s house the whole time. Melanie couldn’t get to the highway fast enough. This was officially the dumbest idea she had ever had.

  She wasn’t ready to give up her investigation yet, though—she just needed to be smarter about it.

  67

  A CRYSTAL CHANDELIER hung from the ceiling of the cozy ballroom. It was big enough to hold maybe a hundred people, but there were fewer than that inside it now: a clump of twenty professors, an equal-sized huddle of students, and a few brave souls from each group daring to network with the other. Most of the professors had plastic stemware in their hands, courtesy of the bar in the corner. A few students were doing damage to the buffet of mini quiches and barbecue sliders. The food sat in silver trays on white-clothed tables under the chandelier, bisecting the room. A single row of chairs lined the walls, a last resort for the socially hopeless.

  Smiles didn’t belong here at all, but no one had looked twice at him on the way in. He had smiled generously to the girl at the door, wearing the orange lanyard he’d swiped from one of the cardboard boxes behind the registration table. He’d turned the blank name tag around the wrong way.

  His plan was officially in motion, and it felt good. Tonight was the first step: identifying the NSA agent, and getting him—or her—interested.

  By now, they were thirty minutes into the hour-long reception for the best and brightest math minds in the country. A bunch of universities were hosting the event, looking to woo high school whizzes into their math programs and college kids to their graduate schools. Apparently the NSA did some recruiting here, too—though they did it quietly, the way they liked to do everything else.

  Ben had given Smiles this background while they’d scrambled to prepare for this moment. Ben’s role here would be easy enough. He’d gone into the reception ahead of Smiles, fifteen minutes ago. All he had to do was give the NSA agent his article as planned, and then hang around long enough to ensure Smiles knew who the agent was. They had placed the article in a bright red folder to make it stand out, but Smiles didn’t see anyone carrying a red folder, and he didn’t see Ben.

  Smiles used a healthy portion of his available willpower to refrain from heading to the bar. He sauntered toward the food instead, checking every face he could on the way. The sliders were soggy, and there was no such thing as a good mini quiche. What was wrong with good old pizza rolls? Smiles shook his head as he slapped a few shrimp tarts on his plate and reminded himself he wasn’t there for the food.

  Luckily, a few of the students hadn’t dressed up. He didn’t look quite as out of place as he could have in his plain white T-shirt, the classiest piece of clothing he’d brought on the trip. He was bobbing his head for a better angle into the collection of students when he heard a voice at his back.

  “Aren’t those delectable?”

  Smiles wheeled to find a tall bald man with thin-frame glasses and a name tag with an intimidating number of colored ribbons hanging from it. It said: PETER WELSH, PH.D., CRYPTCON CHAIRMAN.

  Oh, great. Smiles was talking to the head honcho of the entire conference.

  “Peter,” he said, extending a bony hand.

  Smiles shook it and forced himself at ease. “Like I don’t know who you are, Dr. Welsh.”

  The chairman guffawed and picked up a slider, taking it down in a bite. All the while, Smiles made a half-circle maneuver to get a better look at the attendees. The event was going to be breaking up soon, and Smiles needed to find the NSA agent fast.

  “Well, you’ve got the advantage on me, then,” the chairman said. “Tell me a little about yourself. I love hearing about our talented students. You’re all so impressive.”

  “I’m Harold,” Smiles said. “I just flew in, actually, but the conference looks great. Per usual. You put on such a great show.”

  Smiles was pretty pleased with himself. The chairman seemed to be eating out of his hand. The ribbons on his name tag fluttered as he leaned in conspiratorially, like they were old friends. “What�
��s your area of interest, Harold?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Smiles had just spied Ben in the corner of the room. When their eyes met, Ben’s went wide. Apparently, he knew who Smiles was talking to. His lips read: What the . . . ?

  Smiles shrugged helplessly, then saw Ben direct his eyes to the far wall. There, in the same blue suit they’d seen him in earlier, was the guy they’d hidden from in the hallway. The copier salesman. He was holding a bright red folder in his hands, tossing his empty food plate away. Ben hadn’t been paranoid after all—the guy was, in fact, the NSA agent. And now he was shaking hands with people, ready to leave.

  “Your niche,” the chairman said, demanding Smiles’s attention. “Tell me what you’re working on. I love to hear what you students are up to.”

  “Careful there. I could bore you all night with that one.” Smiles hoped for a laugh that would get him off the hook, but the chairman only raised his eyebrows in anticipation as he polished off another slider. Smiles gulped. He summoned every bit of jargon he’d ever heard from Ben. “Well . . . there are these zeta functions, I’m sure you’ve heard about them. And I’ve also been dabbling in elliptical curves, those are good. I can’t get enough of those, actually. It’s a little complicated to explain, but—”

  “Tell me where you’re from, son.” The chairman reached out and turned his name tag around, finding nothing.

  “Like I said, fresh off the plane.” In the distance, Smiles saw the NSA agent leaving the reception. If he got away, they’d lose any chance of making this work. Their plan hadn’t even gotten started, and already it was crumbling around him. “Haven’t gotten a proper name tag yet, but—”

  “What school?” Something had definitely changed in the chairman’s tone.

  Smiles took a step toward the door. “I, uh . . . Berkeley.” His mother’s school was the first to pop into his mind. “But look, I should probably—”