by John C. Ford
“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.”
83
MELANIE DIDN’T WANT to open it.
She’d gotten through Rose’s email account without finding any new messages about Tarasov or Alice’s letter. But then, double-checking the “sent items” folder, she spotted another message to [email protected]. Melanie had sent hundreds of emails to that address. It was her dad’s.
The email had a blank subject line. Melanie ate the last spoonful of her blueberry yogurt, which she’d only ordered because the guy behind the counter had been giving her the hairy eyeball. She scraped the bottom of the plastic cup and set it down.
“Please be nothing,” she whispered to no one, and clicked open the message.
Rose Carlisle
To: Marshall Hunt
Thursday, May 12 9:38:03 AM
Re:
Marshall,
You didn’t return my call yesterday—I hope you don’t think I’m going to drop this. Something needs to be done. I have verified Andrei’s material, and it completely checks out. We need to make this right.
Call me. Let’s figure this out.
Rose
For a moment, Melanie couldn’t move. Rose had died not a month after sending that email. Her
brakes had failed on a drive in the country. Rose always drove too fast, and she hadn’t been able to make a raised turn. They found her in a ditch twenty feet below the road, dead on impact. It was accepted as a tragic accident—but it was the kind of thing that could have been engineered as well, couldn’t it?
She slammed her computer shut, drawing another stare from the guy behind the counter. He was around her age, with thick blond hair, dark eyes, and amazing skin. He was the kind of put-together guy she fantasized about when Smiles got on her nerves. He kept staring.
“What!?” Melanie shouted, surprising herself.
The guy edged toward the back—probably getting a manager to deal with the psycho chick with the yogurt. She gathered up her stuff and got out of there before she could make it any worse.
She blazed back on the Pike the way she had come, although she knew she couldn’t go back to Weston tonight. Her palms were slick against the steering wheel as she moved through the weekend traffic. She was going too fast and didn’t care.
Planning would calm her down a bit. First, she needed somewhere to sleep. The answer came to her instantly: Mr. Smylie’s cabin at Squam Lake. She’d been up there a million times with Smiles, and she knew they kept the key hidden in a fake rock by the back door. Nobody would know she’d been there.
It was going to take a long time to drive to Squam Lake, way up in New Hampshire, but she could use the time to think. Her pulse slackened as she settled in behind a sports car cruising down the passing lane. If anybody got a speeding ticket, it was going to be him.
She reviewed what she knew: Rose had come upon some important information about Andrei Tarasov. Information that she had “verified”—whatever that meant—and that her dad apparently didn’t want to deal with. In the email, Rose told her dad that they needed to “make this right.” Within a month, Rose had died in a car accident.
Melanie tried to blink away the thought that her dad could have somehow orchestrated Rose’s death. But she couldn’t ignore it: Both Andrei Tarasov and Rose were dead, and her dad was mixed up in their secrets somehow. If Melanie could find that letter from Smiles’s birth mom, Alice, she was sure it would explain everything.
She cracked the window, drying the sweat beading on her forehead.
The strangest part of the email was the bcc line, to [email protected]. Melanie didn’t recognize the name associated with the address—Henry Worth—but at the moment he was her only lead. She had to find out what he knew and why Rose had copied him secretly on her email.
The sports car darted ahead and Melanie pulled into the right-hand lane, less frantic now that she had the semblance of a plan. She picked up her cell and dialed Smiles. It didn’t matter anymore that they had broken up; he deserved to know this information.
No answer. She held the cell to her mouth and launched into a message. About halfway through she realized she was rambling and probably sounded hysterical. Melanie cringed and said, “I’m just stressed out about this, and, well, I guess this Henry Worth guy is all I have to go on right now. His email address is from Northeastern, so that’s a start. I hope I can find out what was in that letter from your mother. I think that letter has all the answers to everything. I . . . I . . .”
Melanie wanted to tell Smiles that she missed him. It was hard to say if she actually missed him or if it was just that reflex she had—the reflex to make him feel special and wanted.
“I . . . I m—Just call. It’s important. Okay? Okay.”
Melanie made herself hang up.
She was about to toss the phone aside, but on impulse she flipped through the address book again. Melanie had stored Jenna Brooke’s phone number there months ago. She’d never actually dialed it before, but Jenna was the only person who knew anything about Andrei Tarasov.
“Hey, Melanie!” Jenna’s voice crackled over the line.
“Jenna? Hey. What are you up to today?”
“I don’t know. Bobby Teague’s having people over tonight. Might be lame, though. You know Bobby and those lacrosse guys. I don’t think they got the memo that the metrosexual look is—”
“Jenna?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry to cut you off. It’s sort of a long story, but I’m on my way to Squam Lake for the night. It’d be nice to have a friend along if you want to come.”
“Seriously?” Jenna’s voice rang with excitement—and below it, a note of worry. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know—I’ll tell you about it when I see you. You’re the only one I can tell, actually. You’re the only one this would make sense to.”
The line went silent for a moment. “I’m packing now,” Jenna said. She was all business, and Melanie sensed her unquestioning eagerness to help. Would Melanie have acted the same way if Jenna called out of the blue with a strange emotional emergency? “Whatever it is, it’ll be all right. Just come get me.”
“Thanks, Jenna.”
Melanie couldn’t be sure, but she thought she might like the girl.
89
THE ELEVATOR CHIMED, the doors parted, and Smiles stepped out onto the seventh floor.
He’d left Ben and Erin back in the room a minute ago. Now he followed a sign to his left, toward the second room he’d reserved using Erin’s ID. That’s where he would perform the demonstration. Smiles would call Ben with numbers from the NSA agents—they would be too long for a text message this time—and Ben would use the cipher again to generate the private keys. It would prove definitively that they had the key to every online secret in the world.
And then, they would get $75 million two hours later.
This is it, Smiles told himself.
He made another turn and found room 781 just past a stairwell. He was reaching for the card key in his back pocket when a door cracked open, puncturing the silence of the hall. Smiles flinched violently, but it was just a maid, three rooms down, wheeling out a room-service tray. Smiles stilled himself, recovering from the shock. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been afraid of.
It’s gonna be cool. It’s gonna be cool.
He sunk the card key into the door. The light of the cloudless day was streaming down the corridor, but once Smiles stepped inside the room it felt like dusk. Comforters were drawn tight over the beds, pristine as glass on Squam Lake. The heavy curtains blotted out the sunlight. The utter calm of the space felt eerie, but Smiles knew it was only the nerves whirling through his chest.
The alarm clock on the nightstand read 10:51. Nine minutes. Focus, Smiles.
He stared into the mirror over the dresser, aiming for a pose of confidence and power. Instead, he looked like a kid refusing to smile for his class portrait. Smiles was good at lying to himself, though, and this was just the time for it. He kept staring and thought, You’re ready for this. You’re a badass. You’re going to get that money for Ben . . . and yourself. This is your thing, and you’re ready for it.
As he stared at himself, gearing himself up, somehow his own voice transformed into his mom’s. It came to him every once in a while, a little bird in his ear:
You can do it. You can do anything, and doing this will help your friend in a major way. I mean, that’s why you’re doing it, right? To help Ben? Not because it’s a harebrained scheme to earn a false sense of worth and get over your daddy issues, I would hope. Right? Right? Hello?
The opening bars of “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” rocketed through the room. Just his ringtone. Just Melanie. Smiles pushed his heart back down from his throat and sent the call to voice mail. He really could have used a Xanax or something.
Smiles cracked the curtains and a splinter of light cut across the carpet. It didn’t do much to dispel the haunted feeling of the room. He flicked the television on for background noise, but the financial news channel that came up was teasing a report about the Alyce Systems IPO. Smiles muted it.
Sizing up
the brightened space, he figured he would sit behind the desk. If the agent wanted to sit across from him, he would have to settle for a seat on the edge of the bed. It would be uncomfortable. That’s the kind of thing Mr. Hunt would think about—a little curveball to give you a psychological edge in a negotiation. Smiles was beginning to suspect he was a natural at it.
10:54. Six minutes to go.
Smiles pulled out his cell and dialed Ben. “I’m about to call them. You ready?”
“Yeah yeah,” Ben said, but his voice wavered. “Smiles, I’ve had a bad feeling about this since last night.”
“Stop with the negative vibes, okay? We’re gonna get you that money.” He thought about bringing up the matter of his cut (a fifty-fifty split sounded about right), but decided this might not be the best time.
“Yeah, okay,” Ben said, and then his voice got low. “You really think it’s a good idea to keep Erin here? What if something happens?”
“Nothing’s going to happen. Just keep it together.” Smiles heard a mumble of assent that didn’t instill much confidence. “All right, then. The next time I call you, the agents are going to be here. Have that computer humming.”
He clicked off and checked the clock: 10:56.
Screw it. Smiles pulled the agent’s number from his pocket and dialed from the desk phone, figuring that calling early was actually a smart idea—another way to keep him off balance.
A voice answered on the first ring. “Yeah.”
“Room 781,” Smiles said. “Cedar Tower. Be here in ten minutes.” He hung up before the guy could respond.
First step over, Smiles thought.
Ten minutes, tops, until the guy arrived. In a couple hours, you’ll have the money.
Psyching himself up, he ran his palms over the smooth expanse of the desk. It made him think of the desk in his dad’s office—a huge glass thing he kept obsessively clean of papers. Smiles had never seen a speck of clutter on it, just his clean-lined computer monitor and a glass tray underneath for stowing his keyboard. That desk had a way of freaking Smiles out. When you sat across from him, there was nothing to draw his attention from you, no buffer from his glare—which, in Smiles’s case, was usually a disappointed one.
