The Cipher (15 page)

“Something's screwed up here.” Ben's voice was hovering on the edge of sanity. “I don't know what's happening. I can't explain it, but I'm not getting anything here. I'm sorry, Smiles, I don't know what's going on, but—”

“Yes, I see,” Smiles said firmly. “Thank you. I'll call if we need anything else.” He hung the phone up peacefully and turned his eyes to Cole, still circling over the desk. “If you'll have a seat, I have the results.”

Cole sat down on the bed and Smiles passed the page across. He had written the private keys beneath each number, leaving the space under the last number blank.

“Something's missing here,” Cole said with some relish. He un-twirled another cough drop and popped it into his mouth.

“Yes. There's a problem with your number. Perhaps you copied it incorrectly.”

Cole chuckled. “Okay then. Let's see about the others.”

He pulled a second page from his folder, no doubt containing the private keys for each of the five numbers. Withdrawing a pen from his suit, he methodically compared the numbers Smiles had provided to the true private keys. The cough drop made little clicking sounds in his mouth as he went.

He didn't know why Cole was even going through the exercise. Smiles had made a show of staying calm, trying to pass off the screw-up with the final number on the NSA. The fact was, though, they hadn't come up with anything. There was no way the government was forking over millions of dollars for a half-working cipher. Maybe Cole was just torturing him, putting him in his place for making such an outrageous demand. Or maybe he was buying time, trying to figure out whether to arrest him.

Cole closed the folder and stuffed the pen back in his suit. His hand came back out with a mobile phone in it.

Smiles felt a jolt of panic as the guy tapped away. “Who are you calling?” he said as Cole returned the device to his jacket pocket.

Cole ignored the question.

“Impressive,” he said. “Now, where would you like the money delivered?”

97

COLE SHOOK SMILES'S
hand on his way out. He had the Swiss account information tucked away in his leather folder. In exactly one hour, he was coming back. Smiles would confirm the money was in the account, and then hand over the cipher.

“The last number was just a test,” Cole said, halfway out the door. “We wanted to see what would happen if we gave you a number that wasn't the product of two primes.”

Just a head game by the feds, that's all it was. If that's what they needed to do to make themselves feel better about handing over $75 million, Smiles was all for it. He watched Cole leave and let himself exhale. He pushed the door closed, leaned his back against it, and slunk to the floor in a state of utter bliss.

A laugh bubbled up from his insides. Ben had done it after all. Smiles had done it.

After an extended internal celebration, he raised up and looked at himself in the mirror. Standing taller now, a glow on his face. “You did it,” he said.

It wasn't Melanie he wanted to talk to now, or his father. It was his mom, and not the one at the conference. “I did it, Mom,” he said to the mirror, and waited for her imagined reply.

Congrats, baby. That's a crapload of money you just made. For doing . . . what again? Selling Ben's work? And wanting a big slice of it for yourself? Almost sounds like one of those shortcuts to success your dad has always warned you against. You know what feels better than a crapload of money? Devoting yourself to something, using the talents God gave you. You've got a lot of them, Smiles, you're gonna find that out someday
.

Sometimes she could be kinda blunt. “You're harshing my high, Mom.”

Oh fine. I'm happy for you, baby, I am. Go on and celebrate—Ben's waiting for you down there
.

She didn't have to tell him twice. He let his joy carry him out of the room.

He took the stairs down to the fifth floor, burst into the hallway, and jogged down to their room.

“Yo, Ben!” he said, knocking on the door. “Good news, my friend!”

Smiles didn't have to worry about keeping anything from Erin. They'd been pretty much forced to fill her in on the basics that morning, telling her everything except the amount of money they were getting from the government. It was the only way they could get her to stick around without seeming too creepy. Smiles bounced on the balls of his feet, waiting for one of them to get the door.

No one came.
Maybe they turned on the TV and can't hear me
, Smiles thought as he hopped outside the door, looking like a fool and not caring one bit.

“Yo, Ben, c'mon man!”

He pounded on the door some more, until he realized he had his own key. The light at the doorknob turned green as he pressed the card key down and barged into the room.

“Hey, man, we did it!”

Smiles stopped. Before the door closed behind him, his heart had sunk to the floor. All of Ben's stuff was gone. His clothes, his netbook, his army bag with the combination lock. Most of Smiles's things were still there, but someone had rifled through them pretty good. The few clothes he'd brought—a pair of jeans, his Red Sox boxers, and a couple of T-shirts—had been dumped out on a bed. His duffel bag had been turned inside out and thrown on the floor.

Ben was really nervous about something bad happening. Maybe he decided to clear out of the room early
.

Smiles couldn't fool himself, though. Ben would have called if he'd left the room for some reason. He checked his phone to be sure, but saw only the missed call from Melanie.

Smiles backed away from the bed, feeling an instinct that he shouldn't touch anything. Still, he had to press a hand to the wallpaper for balance. He felt like he had a few months before, when he'd signed up for a one-year gym membership and spent five minutes on a treadmill—dizzy and hot and clammy with sweat.

Smiles checked the closet at the front of the room, just to make sure Ben hadn't stowed his stuff in there. The metal hangers clanged against one another as he yanked the door open, finding nothing. Next he checked the bathroom, which had been emptied out and wiped clean. Anything that wasn't nailed down was gone—all of the shampoo bottles, the towels, the little glass by the sink. Smiles could smell something more powerful than your average bathroom cleaner, and from the stinging in his eyes he suspected it was bleach.

Between the fumes and the fear building inside him, Smiles almost blacked out. He stepped out of the bathroom, put his hands on his knees, and tried to breathe. He could only get so much air into his lungs. On the far side of the room, the air conditioner blew into the curtains.

His phone rang in his hand, and Smiles answered it almost before “I'm Shipping Up to Boston” could start. The line was ragged with static. “Smiles! Look out the win—”

Ben's voice trailed away, and then a terrible scratching sound came across the line. Smiles was already yanking the curtains apart. Below in the parking lot, he saw Cole stomping on Ben's phone. Somehow, Ben had grabbed it and made the call. It must have been difficult, because Cole and the other NSA agent, Gary, were carrying him roughly by the armpits.

They were taking him away.

101

BEN HAD NO
chance.

His feet pinwheeled above the asphalt as the two agents whisked him from the casino. They flanked him tightly, handling him with ease. In his free hand, Gary held a sagging black trash bag, which from the angle of his shoulders appeared heavier than Ben. It probably contained Ben's stuff and the items from the bathroom. Even with the lumpy Cole at one side, the agents were plenty strong enough to carry Ben a clear foot off the ground.

Smiles could see now that they were headed for a black minivan. Ben's hands had been bound behind him. He jerked his neck around, shouting a call for help that Smiles couldn't hear.

Smiles pulled at the window latch but knew it was welded shut. He banged on the glass but knew the sound wouldn't reach them. He prayed someone would intervene, but there were no witnesses in the lot.

“Hey!” Smiles shouted into the glass. It barely vibrated as he pounded on the window. He kept at it, but it was only making his fists sore and his arms burn. The agents were about to get away. Smiles had never felt so helpless.

Gary slid open the minivan door, let Cole toss Ben inside, then slammed the door shut. The agents glanced briefly around the lot and got inside. Cole fixed a pair of dark glasses over his eyes and spoke harshly into the rearview mirror.

Smiles hoped that somehow Ben would string the conversation out.

He charged out of the room, heading downstairs.

He took the stairs two at a time. The stairwell was positioned at the end of the hallway, so now he had to backtrack toward the casino lobby to get out to the parking lot. He ran down the row of retail stores for people itching to blow money on overpriced sunglasses and celebrity-endorsed jeans. He took the length of it in full stride, darting right and left to avoid sixty-year-old women in plastic sandals and velour warm-ups, window-shopping for Prada and Gucci. Husbands and wives saw him coming and scooted out of his path.

Only now did Smiles begin to realize, as the chimes of the casino grew louder in his ears, how dumb the whole plan had been—how obvious it must have been to the agents that Ben had the cipher. He was the genius Gary had come to meet at the casino, after all. The agents must have been watching them all night, laughing at their amateur ways. Smiles felt his face get hot with embarrassment as the hallway opened up to the lobby.

He dodged around a CRYPTCON information table, slipped across the marble floor of the entrance, and crashed open the doors to the parking lot. A wave of warm air blew him back. Smiles pushed through it and sprinted across the driveway in the direction of the van. A valet shouted as he crossed inches in front of a Jetta, but Smiles was in no mood to listen. He pressed on despite the protests of his lungs, which weren't used to this kind of thing.

It was a three-hundred-yard trek to the minivan's parking spot, but Smiles didn't have to go that far. He stopped fifty yards short and bent over, chest heaving. His legs had turned to spaghetti. A drop of sweat fell from his forehead, darkening the asphalt.

The parking space was empty. Ben was long gone.

Smiles gulped oxygen as he plodded back to the casino. The valet gave him a dirty look as he walked the stone path to the main entrance. Smiles was used to getting those looks—he'd seen them on teachers and coaches and other adults he'd let down in one way or another over the years. After a while they all melded together into one great glower of disappointment, and now Smiles felt like he deserved it. If it were physically possible to give himself a dirty look, he would have.

The conditioned air of the casino did little to relieve him. The manic sounds from the slot machines hurt his head, reminding him that he needed to get going—to do something to fix this situation he'd created. But what?

Smiles toyed with the phone in his pocket. The logical step was to call the police. He hadn't done that yet, and he knew why: He was clinging to some stupid, dying hope that he could still rectify things.

Just feet away from him, people were winning jackpots for doing nothing more than pulling the arm of a slot machine. Meanwhile, Ben had worked on something real, something actually worth a fortune. And then Smiles got involved, and it had turned into a nightmare.

Smiles stopped, gritted his teeth, and entered 911. For once in his life he didn't want to give up, but Ben's life might be in danger. He pressed “send.”

“Emergency services, where are you located?”

The 911 operator sounded like a harried mother, demanding to know why he was out past curfew. Smiles opened his mouth but nothing came out. It had been a mistake to call from his cell. He was dealing with powerful people here. People with unlimited budgets. People who had taken Ben against his will and wiped any trace of him from the hotel. They would do anything to keep this thing from going public, and if they ever checked the records of this call, they could track it back to him.

“Where are you located? Are you in danger, caller?”

He was preparing to speak when he saw the CRYPTCON information table and was struck by a thought:
Maybe my mother could help
.

It made a lot of sense, if you thought about it. She would know how the NSA operated, but she wasn't too chummy with them, if all that talk about Never Say Anything and No Such Agency was any indication. Plus, if anybody in the world owed Smiles a favor, it was her.

He ran to the information table, manned by a willowy guy with greasy hair that offered a potential solution to the domestic oil supply problem. He marked a page in his book as Smiles approached.

“Can you tell me where Professor Taft is?” Smiles asked. Another drop of sweat fell from his face, this time onto the cover of the book,
The Blackjack Bible
. Smiles smeared it off with the bottom of his T-shirt and smiled innocently.

After a long moment lamenting the damage done to his reference material, the guy picked up a printout and said, “She's starting in room 132 in five minutes.” His eyes stared at the spot on Smiles's chest where an orange lanyard should have hung. “Are you registered?”

“Sort of,” Smiles said, and dashed down the hallway to the conference area.

He turned the corner where Erin had given him the eye the day before, then started scanning the conference rooms. Each had a plastic square by its entrance, identifying it with a number that could be read in braille below. The theater where they'd held the opening session was 130. Two doors down, Smiles burst into a much smaller room, with chairs for maybe forty people and nothing more elaborate than a table with a microphone on it at the front.

His mother sat behind it, flipping through blue index cards as the full room of people settled into their seats. Some seemed to recognize him from the opening session. Whispers circulated in the room as he approached Alice.

Her lips settled in an emotionless line at the sight of him. Her throat clenched, the only signal of her distress, before she leaned into the microphone. “We'll get started in one moment,” she said, and led Smiles out of the room without a word. The murmurs grew as he left.

Out in the hall, his mother got some distance from the room before turning back to him. She yanked at the sleeves of her blazer, composing herself. “We have a lot to talk about, but I'm sorry, this isn't an ideal time for a conversation.” Her voice was flat—the voice from the phone. “Or an ideal place,” she added.

She obviously knew who he was. And Smiles realized then that she thought he was stalking her—that he'd come to Fox Creek for the very purpose of confronting her.

“Look,” he said, “I honestly didn't even know you would be at this thing. That was, like, a total coincidence. And I'm sorry about interrupting your lecture.” His guest appearance at the student mixer couldn't have helped, either, but he dropped it.

She watched him like she was posing for a painting: motionless, eyes as dead as her voice. Smiles felt the anger rise within him.

“Anyway, something really bad has happened to my friend, and—”

“I'm sorry, but we just can't do this now. I have to get to this session.” She checked her watch. “I'm already late.”

“I need your help here,” Smiles pleaded. He couldn't believe she wouldn't give him five minutes. “There's no one else I can go to. I mean, you know things about the NSA, right?”

She held up her hand. “Look, maybe we can set a time to talk. Calling you, that was a mistake. Still, I know there are things that we should, or that
I
should, explain.” For a brief moment she had turned into a human being. “But let's not make this”—her eyes tracked a few conference stragglers passing them in the hall—“a matter of public consumption. And for now I'm quite late, and this conference is very important.”

“I'm not important?” Even after not hearing from her his whole life, he could hardly believe this.

“That's not what I said. It's just a case of very poor timing, and I really need to go.”

Was he supposed to wait another eighteen years, when it might be more convenient for her? Smiles remembered the opening session—the man with the mustache going on and on about her bravery. She had risked getting tossed in jail to protect one of her students, but when it came to her son, she couldn't give him the time of day.

“You're my
mother
. I'm in a bad situation, and I'm asking for your
help
.”

“I can't, not now.”

That was all she said before she marched back toward the conference room, swiping at her eye.

Smiles stumbled back down the hallway, gut-punched by the conversation. He walked in a daze to the lobby, where the stores he had run past just minutes ago shot off down a hallway to his left. At the mouth of it was Starbucks. Its seats spilled into the lobby.

And there, in one of the green chairs, sat Erin.