The Cipher Read online

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by John C. Ford

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Ford, John C. (John Christopher), date-

  The cipher / John C. Ford.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Robert ‘Smiles’ Smylie and his friend Ben become embroiled in a high-stakes negotiation with a pair of suspicious Feds when Ben cracks a code with the power to unlock all the Internet’s secrets”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62261-2

  [1. Ciphers—Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 3. Computer crimes—Fiction. 4. Internet—Security measures—Fiction. 5. New England—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F75315Cip 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014019432

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About The Riemann Hypothesis

  Epigraph

  SIXTEEN YEARS AGO

  THURSDAY

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 19

  FRIDAY

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 71

  SATURDAY

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 137

  SUNDAY

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 151

  Chapter 157

  Chapter 163

  Chapter 167

  Chapter 173

  MONDAY

  Chapter 179

  Chapter 181

  Chapter 191

  Chapter 193

  Chapter 197

  Chapter 199

  Chapter 211

  Chapter 223

  Chapter 227

  Chapter 229

  Chapter 233

  Chapter 239

  Chapter 241

  Chapter 251

  Chapter 257

  TUESDAY

  Chapter 263

  Chapter 269

  Chapter 271

  Chapter 277

  Chapter 281

  Chapter 283

  Chapter 293

  Acknowledgments

  TO MY FATHER,

  JOSEPH FORD

  THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS is a real mathematics theory, first proposed in 1859, which remains unproven to this day. The things you will read in this book about its importance to modern encryption systems are true.

  The rest, thankfully, is not.

  “I don’t believe in mathematics.”

  —Albert Einstein

  SIXTEEN YEARS AGO

  THE MAN IN the stolen car called himself Andrei Tarasov.

  He drove west out of the city, fleeing Boston into a black December night. The car’s heater had gone out, and an icy wind knifed in through its rusted-out frame. The man’s frozen breath swirled before him; his fingers stung with cold. He ignored the pain. There was no time to think about comfort.

  He had been awake for two days straight, ever since the men had come for him, and his body was long past the point of exhaustion. Fear alone kept him alert now. His eyes darted over the highway, watching for any sign that they had picked up his trail. He saw none—just the sparkling lights of Boston receding in the rearview mirror, slipping back through the snowfall that danced across the road.

  The car shuddered with effort up a rise. In the rearview mirror, the city lights jostled with the vibration.

  A vast skyline jittering in the night—it was just how Boston had appeared to him the first time, years ago, his face pressed to the cold plastic of an airplane window. He had been a different person then, with a different name. An innocent kid with a gift for mathematics, brought to the United States on scholarship. He’d never been outside Russia, much less seen an American city, and its glistening towers had filled him with awe. Now, a wanted man, he watched the city vanish behind him and knew he would never see it again.

  The men had appeared the day before. Rounding the corner on his walk home, he’d spotted a black sedan sitting fifty yards from his apartment. The car was far too nice to belong on his street. His neighbors were poor immigrant families who lived on top of one another in broken-down homes, the narrow gaps between them webbed with laundry lines. The man who called himself Andrei Tarasov was not wealthy, either. He knew things of tremendous value, though, and he had a good many secrets.

  At the sight of the car, he’d dashed into a corner market. Nestling behind a cooler at the window, he took shallow breaths that betrayed his sudden panic. A part of him had known the day would come; the dread of it kept him up nights, drawing dark circles under his eyes. If he was right, the men in the car worked for the State Department. They would have a long file on him. They would know of his contacts with the Russian spy network.

  He had been the ideal recruit: an advanced student of cryptography at Harvard, doing government-sponsored research on intelligence systems. A perfect candidate to funnel information back to Moscow.

  He waited behind the cooler for long minutes, until finally a man opened the passenger door. The flash of metal on his overcoat might have been an American flag pin. The curl of plastic extending from his scarf might have been an earpiece. The man walked the length of the street and back again. If you weren’t watching closely, you wouldn’t have noticed the attention he paid to a particular apartment fifty yards from his car.

  The man who called himself Andrei Tarasov did notice, and he knew then that his life was over. He rushed out the back exit and made it to the Jamaica Plain community bank just before closing, where he withdrew his meager savings. Within an hour he had bought the Avenger and an unregistered Walther P88 pistol from a Ukrainian man on his block known to traffic in stolen goods. Over that night and the following day, he put his affairs in order as best he could while staying clear of the men keeping watch over his apartment.

  As far as he knew, they hadn’t caught up with him yet. He sped forward, blowing
warmth into the curled fists of his gloveless hands. The car was all but empty—he had left his possessions behind. The only two things that mattered now lay beside him on the passenger’s seat: the gun and a thin brown package.

  They skittered across the cold-hardened plastic as he turned off the highway. The rattle of the engine softened as he eased onto a two-lane road, taking comfort in the blanketing darkness of the suburb. The men would have a hard time taking him by surprise out here.

  The snow was falling thicker now, frosting the handsome trees of the suburb. A pristine white carpet materialized on the street as he drove on—still checking for followers, still finding none. It was a fairy-tale place, this suburb. He was used to cramped spaces, littered pavement, the blare of city life. Here the lawns stretched endlessly away from the street, rolling back to majestic houses ablaze with warm lights.

  He watched for street numbers on the gates outside the homes. The one he had been searching for appeared on his left, a grand brick affair with gleaming white columns lining the front. He eased to the curb and cut the engine. The quiet of the snow muffled what little sound he made exiting the car. Against the curtains in an upstairs window, the shadowed form of a woman cradled a child against her shoulder. Calming it from a bad dream, perhaps.

  The woman’s head was bent to the child, her full attention occupied. He had little fear she would notice as he approached the house by the front path. Crouching at the door, he eased the mail slot open. The package he balanced there appeared an ordinary thing from the outside: a regular brown package, just large enough to hold a pad of paper. At his push, it whispered to the floor.

  He retreated down the steps and stationed himself under a tree. In his right hand, he held the gun.

  The snow slanted down through his vision, and in that final moment he was no longer standing under a tree in Massachusetts. He was a kid in Saint Petersburg, packing a suitcase while a blizzard blew outside his window. He was standing in the roadside slush, waiting for the bus to the airport. He was kissing his mom good-bye, wiping snow from her graying hair. His eyes filled with tears, but it was only the winter wind. He was seventeen, a prodigy on his way to America, and he had never been more excited.

  He had a great dream then: a dream to solve the Riemann Hypothesis. It was the goal of all great mathematicians. Whoever did it would stand with Newton and Einstein as one of history’s greatest thinkers. The man who called himself Andrei Tarasov had been bold then, and when his plane lifted off from Saint Petersburg, he thought he would be the one.

  But mathematics was a young man’s game, and he was over thirty now.

  His season for greatness had passed, and now he stood under the brittle branches of the tree, his shoulders flecked with snow, and considered the mother and child in the window. The woman’s shadow waved across the curtains and rested her young one down in bed. One day that child would understand what he had left inside the package. That would be his legacy now.

  He shut his eyes, raised his right arm, and hoped the shot wouldn’t disturb the child’s sleep.

  “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.”

  —Galileo Galilei

  THURSDAY

  “A man has a hundred dollars and you leave him with two. Boy, that’s subtraction.”

  —Mae West, My Little Chickadee

  2

  IT WAS HIS eighteenth birthday, and what was he doing?

  Was he sitting front row at some amazing concert? No.

  Was he in the bleachers at Fenway, scarfing cheese dogs and nachos? No.

  Hot-tubbing with Melanie at the cabin on Squam Lake? No, no, no.

  It was his eighteenth birthday, at nine thirty in the morning, and the biggest thing on his agenda was a trip to Massachusetts General Hospital.

  Smiles had thought a lot about his eighteenth birthday over the years. It was, after all, the day his $7 million trust fund kicked in—and if his life hadn’t gone haywire in the last year, he would have been celebrating in style. But his life had gone haywire, and now his gut was twisting in that way it did every time he had to go to Mass General.

  He had woken up five minutes ago, stirred by a harsh band of sunlight inching across his living-room couch. Smiles had crashed on it again last night. A constellation of potato-chip crumbs were stuck to his cheek; they cascaded softly to the carpet as he squinted at the bare white walls of his one-bedroom apartment.

  Smiles lived at the Pemberton, an apartment building in Cambridge distinguished mostly by its crumbling brick and loud plumbing. It charged exorbitant rent on the sheer force of its pretentious name and proximity to MIT, where many of its residents attended college. If Smiles had realized the nerd-to-normal-person ratio was so out of whack at the Pemberton, he never would have set foot in the place, but it was too late for that.

  He’d rented the apartment back in the fall, shortly after getting the boot from Kingsley Prep. Which, on the whole, was one of the better things that had happened to him lately. There was a certain embarrassment factor to getting kicked out of school, sure, and it didn’t help any that his dad was Robert Smylie. But of all the disasters that struck in the last year, it would hardly sniff the top-ten list. There were a lot of fringe benefits to the deal, including a license to sleep as late as you wanted. Smiles, who rarely woke before ten, decided to stay put another fifteen minutes out of principle.

  As he closed his eyes, he heard the scrape of a flier being shoved under his door. His landlord was at it again. The guy always had some urgent bulletin to share about the laundry room (Please retrieve your clothes in a timely fashion, in consideration of your fellow residents), or the parking garage (Please respect the handicap spaces, in consideration of the disabled), or somebody who had left the community room a mess in yet another failure to consider their fellow man.

  The sun pierced his eyes and Smiles reminded himself, for the fiftieth time, that he should really invest in some curtains. Groaning, he dislodged the stray bag of chips from the cushions and fished out the remains for breakfast. Jalapeño. Not bad.

  After that, there was nothing to do but start his morning routine. It began, per usual, with a survey of the damage to his apartment from last night’s festivities. (Moderate to extensive, depending on whether a spilled bottle of Jägermeister caused permanent carpet stains.) Next he hopped in the shower, then fed the thirteen exotic fish in the three giant tanks he kept in his apartment. The tanks were a major violation of his lease, but besides that, caring for his fish was the most responsible thing Smiles did on a daily basis, an accomplishment he was rather proud of. As far as commitments went, that left only the trip to Mass General. Time to rip off the bandage. Smiles laced his shoes and gathered up his keys.

  On the way out the door, he bent to scoop up the flier . . . only to realize it wasn’t a flier at all. It was a card, with his name written across the envelope in precise little letters. Smiles knew the handwriting—the card had come from Ben, the wacko kid who lived across the hall and went to MIT. He was only sixteen years old and a certified geek, but somehow the two of them got along.

  Smiles took the card with him as he left the apartment, experiencing a tickling sensation that he was forgetting something. This was an extremely common occurrence and easy to ignore.

  It was washed from his mind completely by the time he got down to Watson Street, swept the usual complement of parking tickets off the windshield of his Infiniti G37, and got going. The Infiniti was his most prized possession, and Smiles rarely drove it under the speed limit. Only on these trips to the hospital did he drive extra slowly, extending the ride as long as possible without bringing traffic on the Longfellow Bridge to an absolute halt and/or getting rammed from behind. Even then, the trip always seemed to pass in one short, dreadful breath.

  His stomach tightened as he traced a slow path over the Mass General campus. Smiles knew his way through the lifeless gray buildi
ngs and construction zones all too well by now, just like he knew the giant knot overtaking his insides: a huge, pretzel-shaped thing that would tie up his guts until he got out of this place.

  He grabbed a ticket at the parking garage and found a spot on the third level. Smiles knew he should get out of the car right away, but he could never make himself do it. Instead he stayed there, frozen, while the sports-talk-radio guys babbled on about the Red Sox’s struggling bullpen. His thumb rubbed across the parking ticket with a half-conscious worry reflex.

  Grasping for an excuse to put things off, Smiles plucked the card off the passenger seat and opened it—some generic thing with rainbows that Ben had probably grabbed blind from the drugstore shelf. Smiles laughed at the perfect, miniature handwriting:

  Happy Birthday, Smiles!

  (And thanks again for the computer.)

  Your friend,

  Ben

  P.S. Don’t forget to pick me up.

  Two weeks ago, he had given Ben one of the ten laptops sitting unopened in his closet. They came from his dad, who got all the latest computers for free. He had hundreds at his office—he passed them out like Tic Tacs.

  Smiles closed the card with a sudden, overwhelming sadness.

  All the computer companies tried to impress his dad with their latest products. You couldn’t buy a computer anymore without finding the logo for his company, Alyce Systems, stuck on it somewhere: the two interlocking keys that had become the universal symbol for computer security. Over the last decade, Alyce Systems had become the biggest success story in Boston. Time magazine had actually called his dad “the Man Who Changed the Internet.”

  And then a year ago, the Man Who Changed the Internet went to see his doctor about a nagging headache and they discovered it. A brain tumor. Nobody knew how long he’d live.

  The whole thing was unreal.

  Smiles yanked the key from the ignition and laid his head against the seat. He shut his eyes, letting his head fill with the buzz from the parking-structure lights. Sometimes this was as far as he made it. He’d sit in the car for a while, then retreat to the apartment and play online poker, lying to himself that he’d return to the hospital later. Today was Smiles’s birthday, though. His dad was expecting him. It wasn’t exactly like he could call up and say, Sorry Pops, can’t make it, not feeling too well.