The Cipher Read online

  “This way,” he said, and got a few steps before realizing Ben wasn’t at his side. He was still standing under the chandelier at the entrance—just frozen there, notebook still in hand (naturally), eyes pointed thoughtfully skyward. What a piece of work. Smiles marched back and waved in Ben’s line of vision.

  “Stargazing?”

  Ben stared at Smiles like he was coming back from a dream. “Sorry, I just . . . never mind.”

  “Give the brain a rest, dude. It’s time to gamble.”

  Ben scurried to Smiles’s side, checking his watch as they approached the reception desk. “I need to hurry, actually,” he said. “The opening session starts soon.”

  The receptionist guy was wearing a sherbet-blue jacket with dangly gold trim at the shoulders, like somebody had asked Walt Disney to design some military uniforms and they’d gotten shipped to a casino in Connecticut by mistake.

  “Can I help you gentlemen?”

  “I’m here with the CRYPTCON . . . conference,” Ben said.

  “Oh my,” Sergeant Sherbet said. “Some young code breakers, eh? So exciting. Okay, name on your reservation, please?”

  Ben pulled a sheet of paper from his backpack. “Ben Eltsin,” he said, and rattled off a confirmation number. Sergeant Sherbet sprung to action at his computer, but Smiles got distracted from the rest of the exchange.

  A girl was headed their way. Cutoff jean shorts. Toned legs. Sun-bleached hair. A strand of it cascaded silk-like across a pixie face with honey-colored eyes. Smiles prayed to a merciful God she would stop at the desk to check in. She did. And she gave him a grin, too.

  She had a scar high on her cheek, barely the size of a fingertip, shaped like a starfish. It crinkled when she smiled. Maybe Smiles’s radar was off after three hours in the car with Ben, but he thought there was something happening here. Smiles returned her grin—going for Yeah, I’m feeling it, too.

  “Hey,” he said, because you had to start somewhere.

  “Hey.” Her voice was like a warm bath.

  “I’m Smiles.” He didn’t extend his arm, on the theory that they were beyond handshakes already.

  “Smiles?”

  “A nickname.” He shrugged, meeting her eyes, thinking, This is totally working.

  She nodded and pointed a thumb at herself. “Erin.”

  He was getting a better read on her now. Her face was soft—her features cute and rounded—but there was something devilish there. Those honey-colored eyes, they were heat seekers. If there was any justice in the world, Smiles would be getting some action tonight.

  “Here for the weekend?” she said.

  “Yeah, for this conference thing,” Smiles said. “You?”

  Erin gave him a teasing smile, and the starfish scar drew in on itself coyly. “Guess you need to go.”

  He followed her eyes over his shoulder. Ben was standing at the side of the reception desk, flapping a card key envelope at his side with a pointed look of impatience. Sometime soon, they were going to have a long talk about the wingman concept.

  “Ermm . . . yeah . . .” But before Smiles could salvage the situation, Erin had stepped to Sergeant Sherbet and Ben was pulling him down a hallway with signs that said CRYPTCON AHEAD. It looked like Walt Disney had designed the carpet in here, too.

  “Was that really necessary?” Smiles said.

  “Yeah, sorry. I know you were flirting with that girl.”

  “Flirting? She was practically giving me a lap dance.” He sighed—Ben would never appreciate the astronomical chances of meeting a pixie sun goddess who was doing her best to throw herself at you inside of five minutes.

  “C’mon,” Ben said, checking the little envelope with the card keys. “Cedar Tower, room 537.”

  “What’s the big rush?”

  “They said there was going to be a special guest at this opening session. I don’t want to miss it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’ll be epic,” Smiles said as they followed a sign to the Cedar Tower through the conference-center part of the hotel. Turning a corner, they saw a registration table with a CRYPTCON sign and a line of people straight from Dork Central worming out behind it. Smiles cringed at the collection of short-sleeve business shirts, wrinkled dress pants, and old-man walking shoes—in some cases, all on one person. Would it kill these people to hit a J.Crew?

  Ben’s tiny bird shoulders slumped at the sight of the line. “Mind dumping this in the room for me?” he said, holding out the gym bag that doubled as his luggage. “I really need to get in that line.”

  Smiles grabbed the bag, happy to be loosed on his own. “Just call me Jeeves.”

  Ben handed him one of the room keys. “Thanks. So where can I find you later?”

  “The poker room,” Smiles said. “I’ll be the one with all the chips.”

  “I’m sixteen. You know I can’t get in there.”

  “You don’t have a fake ID?” Ben was worse off than Smiles had thought. “You promised you’d do some gambling.”

  “I just said that to get you out of my room,” Ben said, as if they’d been over it ten times already.

  “Yeah, well . . .” Smiles paused. The pixie sun goddess had just passed by, engrossed in a text as she turned the corner. The surprising part was that now she seemed to be headed straight for the CRYPTCON registration tables. Then a wonderful thing happened. She swiveled and walked backward a few strides. As she did, her eyes turned up from her phone, lit on him, and seemed to say, You coming or what?

  “Actually,” Smiles said, “tell me about this opening session again.”

  29

  JENNA BROOKE WOULD not shut up.

  “. . . It’s like, oh sure, Stace, they’re totally natural—no way are those inner tubes that suddenly appeared inside your mom’s lips collagen injections or anything . . .”

  She absolutely would not shut up.

  They rode to Boston every Friday for their “Career Explorer” internship. Melanie’s dad had volunteered to host two Kingsley students in the Alyce Systems HR department, so Melanie had signed up (obviously she had, because her dad had half suggested it). It wasn’t a bad deal, except for the ride from Weston—on the commuter line, then switching to the T at North Station—which Jenna inevitably filled with analysis of people’s body parts and, if the subject of discussion was a girl, Jenna’s inevitable suspicions about her promiscuous ways.

  “. . . not saying he isn’t halfway cute. Have you ever seen him in his baseball uniform? I’m not gonna lie, when I saw him out there in that game against Country Day . . .”

  Melanie wished that she could just drive in with her dad, but he left early and stayed late. He’d been walking out this morning, carrying a heavy briefcase and eating a bagel (both of which, like everything else her father did, made her fear an imminent heart attack), when Melanie had impulsively asked him if he knew anyone at Alyce Systems named Andrei.

  Her father stopped at the door. “Tarasov?”

  Melanie went with it. “Yeah, Andrei Tarasov.”

  “Why?”

  Instantly, Melanie realized what a bad idea this was. No way could she tell him about snooping in Rose’s email account. Now she had to make something up on the spot, right there at seven o’clock in the morning, and she was a horrid liar to begin with.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess. I think he’s a programmer?” Melanie spat out the line just to say something; a lot of Alyce’s employees had something to do with programming, one way or another. “I saw his name on something last week and didn’t recognize it.”

  That last part was actually a pretty smooth recovery. Melanie’s first project in HR had been some make-work assignment entering the programmers’ and analysts’ information (hire date, etc.) on a spreadsheet. Melanie probably would have remembered the name from that whole day of tweaking the spreadsheet just so.

  Her dad chewed
down his bagel, while Melanie mourned every last carb he was ingesting. “What did you see his name on?”

  “Umm . . . something from Framingham, I think. From payroll.” A lot of programmers worked in the Framingham complex, where they also had a payroll office. Whatever. This was disaster territory now. Melanie, who had never been inside a church in her life, had rarely felt so sinful. “I was just wondering . . .” she said, trailing off lamely.

  “I doubt it would have come from payroll. He left a long time ago. Don’t remember him that well.”

  “Oh, okay, thanks, Dad,” Melanie said, relieved when he kissed her cheek and stepped out the door. He waved good-bye to her from the path, his bagel swinging high in the morning air.

  The train rattled to a stop at Park Street.

  “This is us,” Jenna said, perky as ever, oblivious to the fact that Melanie had spent the entire subway ride zoned out on thoughts of some guy named Andrei. They climbed the dusty, traffic-worn stairs of the T and ducked into an Au Bon Pain so Jenna could get her latte fix—“. . . since when would I want to be a cheerleader? It’s like, yeah, having Greg Simmons palm my ass ten feet in the air for a whole football game isn’t exactly my idea of . . .”—and made the thankfully short walk to the Alyce Systems headquarters.

  Melanie didn’t have much actual work to do, and most days she savored the light pulse of energy from the business-people gathering at the elevators, milling around the coffee station, settling into life on the thirty-fourth floor. A hush blanketed everything. Even the copy machines, which would spend the next eight hours hammering out documents, hummed a calming white noise throughout the floor.

  Best of all was the window by her cubicle. You could look down and sense the order to life: the rhythm of the traffic, the march of the waves.

  Melanie didn’t stop long at the window today. She logged in and went to Google right away. “Andrei Tarasov,” she entered, remembering the last name her dad had mentioned. Just four hits came up, three of them irrelevant. The other one, the first on the list, was a fifteen-year-old article from the Boston Globe’s Metro section.

  The headline ran: SOFTWARE TECH FOUND DEAD AT WESTON RESIDENCE.

  It took Melanie all of twenty seconds to read the article that took her breath away:

  WESTON—Police discovered the body of a software analyst on the front lawn of his employer in yesterday’s predawn hours.

  The man, identified as Andrei Tarasov, 36, was declared dead on the scene in this genteel enclave. According to a police spokesman, he was the victim of a gunshot wound to the head. A semiautomatic pistol was found in his hand at the scene, suggesting a potential suicide. A coroner’s ruling is expected within the week.

  Mr. Tarasov had been working at a start-up software firm, Alyce Systems, for less than a year. The founder, Robert Smylie, is the owner of the property on which Mr. Tarasov’s death occurred. Police say Mr. Smylie has been in Silicon Valley on business for the last week and is not suspected of having any role in the death.

  Mr. Smylie released a statement praising Mr. Tarasov’s work and expressing regret over the loss to Mr. Tarasov’s colleagues and friends.

  The deceased left no survivors.

  A man kills himself on Mr. Smylie’s front lawn . . . and her dad doesn’t remember him?

  This didn’t make sense.

  This did not make sense at all.

  31

  JUST HIS LUCK.

  Smiles had raced up to the room, tossed their luggage inside, and gotten back to the CRYPTCON registration in world-record time, but Erin had made it through the line already. He planted his hands on his thighs, catching his breath while Ben emerged from the hive of nerds at the registration tables.

  Ben fit an orange lanyard over his head as he walked over. His eyes narrowed as he got closer. “Are you, like, sweating?”

  Smiles ignored him, fruitlessly scanning the crowd for Erin. He could only hope she was as jazzed about this opening session as Ben. “So where do we go?”

  “You really want to come?” Ben said, in a voice that did not qualify as enthusiastic.

  Smiles saw a teachable moment here. He squared Ben’s shoulders. “Lesson one, okay? When it comes to meeting girls, you’ve got to seize every little opportunity you get. Especially you, no offense. A girl smiles at you on the subway? Chat her up. Asks you for directions? Chat her up. You accidentally spill your beer on her? Chat her up. You never know where it’ll lead. Seize the day, man. They put that crap on T-shirts for a reason.”

  “So that’s a ‘yes’?”

  “Now you’re gettin’ it,” Smiles said. “I don’t need, like, top-secret clearance to get into this thing, do I?”

  “No, the conference is public. You just need to be registered.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Just lead the way,” Smiles said, and followed Ben down the hall to a set of double doors. The room inside was surprisingly large—twice the size of a movie theater—with wide rows of seats descending to an empty stage. A trickle of conferencegoers flowed down the aisles at the sides of the room, picking seats at leisure.

  Smiles stuck close behind a larger man as they entered. The woman handing out programs at the door missed him—and his lack of a registration badge—entirely. He picked his way forward to Ben, who was already a quarter of the way down to the stage. “I’m more of a back-of-the-class kinda guy,” Smiles said, but Ben didn’t hear and/or care. Smiles sighed and trailed him to his chosen spot all the way down in the second row, precisely in the middle.

  “You sure you don’t want to just sit up on the stage?” Smiles said, craning his neck for a glimpse of Erin.

  Ben opened his notebook and readied a pen. “I know you want to find that girl, but just do me a favor, okay? Don’t make a scene in here.”

  Smiles turned forward, annoyed with himself as much as Ben. He should have just gotten her number at the registration desk. This had been one of his more half-baked ideas, and now it was too late to leave—the trickle of people coming down the aisles had become a stream. They had nearly filled the unbroken row of seats stretching across the width of the auditorium; it would have been a real production just to make it to the aisle.

  His dark mood from the car ride returned, and again Smiles found himself trying not to think about that phone call.

  It’s better left alone.

  Trying not to think about how he’d been so stupid, sticking his neck out.

  Smiles knew, of course, why he’d made the call: trying to prove some kind of point to Melanie about his maturity. He should have known it’d all go wrong.

  People couldn’t find seats anymore; they stood two deep along the walls. The auditorium was packed and tingling with energy waiting to be focused. Then the air in the room stiffened, and Smiles looked up to see a mustached man in a beige suit setting himself at the podium. The microphone gave a lively squawk when he tapped it. Satisfied, he raised his arms to his sides and said, “Welcome to CRYPTCON!”

  A lusty round of applause filled the theater until the man motioned them silent. “This is going to be our greatest year yet,” he said. “And our special guest speaker at this plenary session is one of the reasons why. You’re all wondering who it is, am I right?”

  The crowd played its part happily. Cries of “Yes!” “You bet!” and “Tell us!” rose up from the seats. A lady in the front row said, “Matt Damon, please!” and everyone roared with laughter.

  The speaker took the microphone off the stand so he could walk across the stage. Really hamming it up, this guy. “We’ll reveal our speaker in just a moment, I promise. But first, for the students and journalists joining us today, let me spend a moment introducing the topic of this session: public-key cryptography.”

  It had been months since Smiles had sat through a lecture. Too bad Ben wasn’t the type for a good game of hangman. He scanned for Erin again, but couldn’t fi
nd her in the sea of rapt faces.

  “Without public-key cryptography, it would be very hard to imagine living in our modern world. Quite simply, it is the tool that keeps our electronic secrets secure: encrypted emails, credit card transactions, all kinds of network data. I could go on and on. It has its origins in the World War II era, when governments were looking for a better method to send coded messages to spies. One problem: If you use the same code with all of your spies, then a single breach of the code threatens all of your secret messages. Some very smart people came up with a solution, known as asymmetrical encryption.” The auditorium hummed with approval.

  “The brilliance of asymmetrical encryption is that it allows one to share secret messages with anyone he likes, without ever sharing a secret code.” The speaker had returned to the podium. He pressed a button on a laptop, and the screen behind him, which had read WELCOME TO CRYPTCON, became a picture of a giant mansion behind a gated driveway.

  “Just to be clear,” he said, “that’s not my house.” They loved it.

  “I use this with my students to illustrate public-key cryptography, which is a type of asymmetrical encryption. The most important type, in fact. And here’s how it works: If I want to receive secret messages, I use two keys.” The guy actually produced two golden keys from his pockets. Smiles would have found it impossibly corny except that it reminded him of the two interlocking keys in the Alyce Systems logo. This man was about to explain the foundation of his dad’s company.

  “One key,” he said, wagging the key in his right hand, “is my public key. I will give this to anyone. It’s the key to my front gate, and if anyone wants to send me a secret message, they simply use it to open the gate, walk to my front door, and drop their message in my mail slot.”

  He tapped the laptop again, and the picture changed to a fancy front door with a brass mail slot.