The Cipher (28 page)

293

ERIN LOOKED OUT
on the street from the widow's walk, watching the day change to night and wondering where she'd be in a year. She had a place for the next month at least. Ben had given her keys and said the rent was paid through the thirtieth. He and his mom were going to stay in a nice hotel until they found a new home.

She could remember his first phone call, six months ago, as vividly as yesterday. He had skipped around things a lot, not saying too much at first, but somehow he kept her on the line. And then slowly his plan for the con had come out. He needed a pretty girl who knew a lot about math. He'd come across her name in his extensive research into every area of Mr. Smylie's life. A local girl who was doing research under his ex-wife? Candidates didn't get more perfect than that.

Erin thought it was perfect, too. She'd been half a year into an experiment to get her life on track and was already getting bored. Maybe she was a genius, but the life of a student fit her too tight. She liked counting cards, and she'd probably still be at it if she hadn't been blacklisted at every casino in Vegas by then. She liked playing with people. She liked gambling in every part of her life.

School was supposed to set her straight, but she'd jumped at Ben's plan.

And now she hated herself for what she'd done. Saying yes to Ben, it turned out, had been the ultimate act of self-sabotage.

She leaned back against the roof and felt the trapped warmth of the shingles under her back. She knew she would come up here every night and think about what it would be like if she had screwed the plan and stayed at that cabin with Smiles. If she'd told him the truth and crossed her fingers that he'd still want to be with her.

And then, looking down at the weed-strewn parking lot of Mercado Rosanna, she saw a black Infiniti going too fast down the cross street. He overshot the market, reversed in the street, and turned up toward the house.

Erin raced down the stairs and peered through the dirty glass of the front door. Her giddy smile faded as the minutes wore on. Maybe he hadn't come back for her at all. Maybe he'd come here to confront Ben. He could be dialing the police right now, waiting for them to arrive.

Erin stepped backward, scared.

Smiles flapped the note in his hands, deciding.

Shanti had given it to him when he returned for one last good-bye. “Real little fella”—that was her description of Ben. The note said:

Sorry, kinda.

You never found me a girlfriend. There's one waiting for you here, though, if you care anymore.

Ben

And at the bottom, an address—the same address from the postmark on Andrei Eltsin's package. Smiles was parked across from it now, unclear on what exactly he was doing there. The shabby house had a tree stump in its tiny front yard, a crack like a canyon in its front steps. Ben had probably grown up here, a million miles from Weston. Smiles looked at the small windows, the torn curtains, the sloppy porch, and he wondered if this was insanity.

Certainly, it wasn't smart on any level. No way could you call it the responsible choice. Definitely, there would be messy feelings to get through. He wavered, shifting the car from park to drive and back again.

Oh please
, came his mom's voice.
This isn't brain surgery, pardon the phrase
.

Smiles was grinning to himself when the voice changed, and he heard his dad speak.
She's right. Trust your instincts—they're better than you think
.

Nodding, Smiles pulled the keys from the Infiniti and cracked the door.

He stood tall on the street. And then, with the house in sight before him, he broke into a run.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Cipher
takes audacious liberties with the history of public-key cryptography, which is widely used in our daily lives and which was created by pioneers in the field, not fictional characters. Among those pioneers are Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle, who are credited with the development of public-key cryptography; Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, the cofounders of RSA Security, who in 1977 developed the RSA encryption algorithm, one of the earliest and most popular methods used in secure data transmission; and Clifford Cocks, who developed a system similar to RSA's in 1973 while working at GCHQ, the British intelligence agency. Cocks was building on the insight of James Ellis, a cryptographer and employee of GCHQ, who earlier had conceived of “non-secret encryption,” which we now know as public-key cryptography.

Due to its top-secret nature, the work of Ellis and Cocks was not revealed publicly until 1997. James Ellis died one month before the announcement.

It is my hope that
The Cipher
stimulates interest in the brilliance of these individuals and others in their field, rather than detracting from it. I also hope that it stimulates interest in the Riemann Hypothesis, the 1859 conjecture that remains unproven as of this writing. If you do solve it, the Clay Mathematics Institute has a $1,000,000 reward waiting. In the meantime, there are several fascinating accounts of the Riemann Hypothesis available for reading, including
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics
, by Marcus du Sautoy; and
Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics
, by John Derbyshire.

I am thankful to those who shared my enthusiasm for this subject (or just listened patiently) as I wrote
The Cipher
. I am particularly grateful to the Fates that placed me in the hands of editor Kendra Levin, who guided me to numerous eureka moments as we solved the puzzle of this story together. You could call her the private key of this novel. Likewise, Sara Crowe, as she does, gave advice and support that exceeded the bounds of literary representation.

Many others at Viking have lent their talents to these pages (and the cover over them) in the publication process, including assistant editor Joanna Cardenas, copyeditors Kate Hurley and Abigail Powers, and designer Eileen Savage. All of them have my sincere thanks, as do readers Karen Barna, Tim Bentler-Jungr, Barb Goffman, Zachary Leffel, Gina Montefusco, Mindi Scott, and Laura Weatherly.

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