The Cipher Read online

  He shrugged at his tower of chips. “Guess so.”

  The Asian woman harrumphed at the interruption. Smiles rolled his eyes for Erin’s benefit. He liked the way hers twinkled back at him while the dealer patted the felt, asking for his bet.

  “I’m sorry,” the dealer said to Erin, “if you’re not playing, you can’t be in this area.”

  She plunked down a wad of hundreds. “Will that do?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, ma’am,” the dealer said, recovering quickly. She slid the crisp bills through her hands and onto the velvet. “Changing two thousand!” she yelled.

  “Well well well,” Smiles said.

  Erin smiled at her chips as they came her way. “Blowing my savings,” she said. “I just got this for finding a number on GIMPS.”

  “You what?”

  Erin looked at him funny. “You’re here for CRYPTCON and you don’t know what GIMPS is?”

  “My friend’s the one at the conference. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Well, you were quite the entertainment this morning.”

  So she was there after all. Smiles pushed away the thought of his mother, right there on the stage in front of him. “Yeah, well, my friend’s a little eccentric,” he said.

  They played out a hand—Smiles busted, Erin won—and then the dealer got busy shuffling a tower of cards. The Asian woman didn’t have the patience for it; she stowed her winnings in her purse, bound for another table.

  “So what’s a gimp, anyway?” Smiles said.

  Erin smiled. “GIMPS. It’s an acronym—the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Lots of the people at the conference do it. It’s just this software you put on your computer to make it search for a special kind of prime number with its spare capacity. They have rewards if your computer finds one big enough. Mine was 445 bits long.”

  “Bits?”

  “Digits. Digits, bits, same thing.”

  “Hold on. They paid you for that?”

  “Yeah.” She said it like it was totally obvious that you would get paid lots of money for finding some useless number. “The government pays big bucks for the really big ones. I just got a little prize from a math foundation.”

  The dealer clapped her hands and showed them her palms, a magician about to do a trick. She dealt a hand and Smiles took a hit, wondering how Erin had gotten into the casino. She couldn’t be twenty-one. He had used the license he got from some BU guys with an underground business making fake IDs. He’d met them out at a bar, and they gave him the license free because they’d all had such a good time that night. It happened back when Smiles was set on becoming a stand-up comedian, but the license was all he’d ever gotten from that endeavor. The name on it was Harold Bottomsworth IV.

  He and Erin played out a few more hands, sitting comfortably in each other’s personal space.

  “So you’re a huge nerd then?” Smiles said after a while. She slapped him, but her fingertips feathered against his arm as they pulled away.

  “I have a complex about being into math. Half the time I’m embarrassed about it, the other half I’m pissed that people don’t realize what a genius I am. Mostly the latter. I have a bit of an ego problem.”

  Her voice was velvety, a half notch deeper than you’d expect from a gymnast-sized girl. The sound of it soothed him like a drug.

  The casino lights played against her butterscotch hair as she turned to him. “I’m not half as smart as the other people here, really. I mean, that was just luck, obviously, my computer finding that prime. But yeah, the government will pay for the big ones because they can be valuable in all kinds of applications.”

  Smiles didn’t want to think about math anymore. He didn’t want to think about Ben’s problem, or terrorists screwing with the stock market, or Alyce Systems being rendered obsolete. He wanted to think about Erin.

  “So how about you hang out with me tonight?” he heard himself saying.

  The direct approach had worked pretty well so far, and she wasn’t looking too put off by it now. “You’ll have to work harder than that,” she said, but there was a smile on her face.

  “Bet on it?” Smiles plunked a stack of black chips inside the circle. “I win, we go to dinner.”

  Erin liked it. “I don’t come that cheap,” she said, nodding to the rest of his stack. “All of ’em, and we’ll talk.”

  Smiles could see the heat seeker coming out. He’d known it since that morning: She loved being wild. He called her bluff, pushing all of his chips to the betting circle. They swallowed it up, spilling across the felt.

  The dealer leveled Smiles’s chips, counting the stacks off efficiently. “Betting $7,300!” she called behind her. The crowd at the rail stirred with voyeuristic pleasure. A guy in a muscle shirt edged up the stairs, looking on.

  “Holy crap, you’re doing it,” Erin said. When he felt her hands clench his arm, Smiles put it in the bank: However this turned out, he was getting some action tonight.

  “Good luck,” the dealer said, fist-bumping the cloth for good measure.

  The dealer’s lightning hands shot his cards across the table. Erin hadn’t put out a bet, so it was just Smiles against the house. He drew an eight and a seven, for a total of fifteen. A terrible hand, except that the dealer showed fourteen. Every idiot in the casino knew what you were supposed to do in this situation: stand on fifteen and watch the dealer bust. Smiles reached to wave the dealer off, but Erin dug her nails into his arm.

  “Take a hit,” she whispered. Her breath was hot on his ear.

  “I have fifteen,” he said. With all the tens in the deck—the actual tens plus all the face cards—there was a huge chance of busting if you hit fifteen. This went beyond thrill-seeking; it was suicide. But Erin just leveled her gaze.

  “Take the hit.”

  Smiles swallowed a potent mix of confusion and masculinity and tapped the felt.

  “Hitting on fifteen, sir?” The dealer’s voice was dubious. Erin nodded.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Smiles normally enjoyed the deliciously nervous moment before the dealer added a card to his hand. Now he was cringing with certain doom as she swept his next card from the shoe. She flipped up a five. Smiles had twenty.

  He breathed. It was like landing in a net you didn’t know was there.

  “Stand,” he said, before Erin could press his luck any further.

  The dealer smiled and drew her own next card. Another five.

  “Nineteen. Player wins.”

  “Holy . . .” Smiles was numb with delight. It felt like he’d gotten away with something, all thanks to Erin. As the dealer doubled his chips, she cupped his ear and whispered more softly than before. “I’m an excellent card counter, among other things.”

  Her words tingled as she pulled back and gave him a wink. Time to firm up dinner plans, Smiles thought as the guy in the muscle shirt appeared at the table.

  “What’s this?” said the dude, now right at Erin’s side. He was looking back and forth between Smiles and Erin like they were giving him a hernia.

  “Oh, you’re here,” Erin said, suddenly off-balance. Smiles saw her eyes go timid for a half second before she collected herself. He didn’t like that look on her, nor the fact that she was putting her hand on the guy’s shoulder.

  “This is Smiles,” she said with a head bob in his direction. “Smiles, Zach. My boyfriend.”

  The way his life was going lately, Smiles almost wasn’t surprised.

  Zach had stringy arms poking out the sides of his gray muscle shirt. You could see, around his neck, the silver line of a ball chain that probably held dog tags. He stood an inch shorter than Erin, his most prominent feature being a tiny upturned nose. He looked like a toy poodle that’s always trying to pick a fight with the Doberman down the street. How dudes like this got cool girlfriends, Smiles would never know. He wa
tched Zach’s hand curl around Erin’s side and wanted to clock him.

  Zach’s eyes fixed on the little sign with the betting limits. “A hundred bucks a hand!?” he said to Erin. “Why are you playing here?”

  Because it’s where I am, Smiles thought.

  He didn’t say it, though—he didn’t want to deal with this scene. He scooped up his chips, his senses still reeling with the feel of her hand, her breath, the lively spark of their conversation even through meaningless talk about the GIMPS thing and how the government would pay you for prime numbers.

  Suddenly, his hand clenched tight around his chips. Smiles knew exactly what Ben needed to do. And it was genius.

  Smiles grabbed a mound of black chips and dumped them in Erin’s hands. “Fun playing with you,” he said. “Now I need to ask a huge favor.”

  53

  MELANIE SCANNED HER closet for something to go with her cardigan.

  Her skinny jeans would be good, or the gray pencil skirt she liked so much. Would that be too dressy for the college scene, though? Her corduroy mini would be casual enough for sure. So the jeans or her mini . . . or maybe those cute capris?

  She had been packing for a half hour now, and it was the first time since lunch that she hadn’t been thinking about Andrei Tarasov. She’d spent the afternoon cabined in her cubicle at Alyce Systems, running Jenna’s crazy news about Tarasov over and over in her mind: Could he really have been a Russian spy? Could Alice’s letter to Smiles have had something to do with that? And why would her dad be afraid to tell her about him?

  The last question was the most troubling of all, and the idea of concentrating on her work—some research project on the Alyce Systems health insurance plan the Easter bunnies had given her—was laughable. With all the nervous questions boiling inside her, it was all she could do not to break her New Year’s resolution to stop chewing her fingernails.

  Now back at the house, with evening falling on the hushed street outside her windows, she’d found a soothing respite in the chore of packing. She made the umpteenth trip from her closet to her bed and laid her capris and yet another sweater in the suitcase.

  She forced herself to stop—this was getting ridiculous. You didn’t need a full bag of clothes for an overnight visit to Smith College. Melanie zipped the suitcase and settled on her comforter, cracking the window for a bit of cooling air.

  Katie’s so much fun, Melanie thought, trying to trick herself into getting excited for the trip.

  She and Katie had planned the visit back in the fall, when Melanie was still considering going to Smith. She had pretty much settled on Vassar by now, though, and with the Andrei Tarasov stuff unresolved, the idea of leaving for the weekend gave her a low-level panic attack. It felt like going out to a movie on the night before a test.

  Alone in her room, Melanie felt the mammoth void of Smiles’s absence. He hadn’t called all day. Of course he hadn’t—she’d slammed a door in his face not twenty-four hours ago. She checked her phone for missed calls, just to be sure. Nothing.

  You can’t be angry with him for not reaching out to you, she told herself. And for the most part, she listened.

  The breeze whispered into her room. It carried the early-spring smell of thawing earth, inviting her outside. Without hesitating she slipped her feet into the nearest pair of tennis shoes, picked up the Andrei Tarasov folder, and dashed off a vague-enough note to her parents. She didn’t want to stop long enough to talk herself out of it. Instead she pulled the Camry out of the garage and headed straight for Boston. Newton Street would take her to the Mass Pike and from there she’d only be a half hour away.

  It would be easy enough to find it. She didn’t know where exactly Andrei Tarasov had lived, but the address was right there in the file beside her.

  59

  SMILES WAS SO jacked up, he could hardly stand it. He pounded on the door to the room, forgetting for a second that he had his card key in his back pocket.

  Ben arrived at the other side before he could fish it out. The poor guy looked the same as when Smiles had left hours ago, only with bed head and darker circles under his eyes. His army bag was slung over his shoulder, padlocked for safety, of course. The copious books inside made sharp angles against the green fabric. Ben looked like one of those ants that can miraculously carry fifty times their own body weight.

  “Dude, problem solved,” Smiles said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Where are you going? You’re not leaving or anything.”

  “No,” Ben said, a little testily. “You won’t let me. I was just going down to Starbucks.”

  “Excellent. So listen, I’ve got a plan. I’ll tell you on the way.”

  This crazy energy had been racing through him from the instant it hit him at the blackjack table. He’d been going full tilt ever since—it was the most productive day he’d had in years.

  Smiles walked in step with Ben down the hall, considering for the first time how to broach this. His idea was genius, no doubt about that. But Ben was a prickly one, and Smiles didn’t want him rejecting it just because he was in a bad mood.

  At the elevators, Smiles punched the down button furiously. “You’re gonna love this. I swear to God, I feel as smart as you right now.” And he did. He really did.

  Ben looked around. “Fine, but you can’t talk about . . . you know . . . out in the open like this.”

  Smiles nodded. It was a fair point, and he didn’t want the little guy getting his hackles up. Another guest approached as the elevator opened; they rode down to the casino level with no sound between them except the murmur of the elevator pulleys.

  The doors parted to reveal a huge group of CRYPTCON nerds wearing their orange lanyards and deciding where to go for dinner. Some bald guy was yelling about a craving for Chinese. He could barely compete with the earsplitting jangle coming from the casino behind them. It sounded like the slot machines were hyperventilating.

  The Starbucks was in sight, away from the casino, but it teemed with over-caffeinated gamblers. Smiles held Ben back. “You’re right, we’re gonna need some privacy for this.” He took a second to get his bearings, then pulled a one-eighty toward a long hallway of shops. “The business center. C’mon.”

  Ben huffed and followed him.

  Smiles had spent a healthy part of the afternoon at the business center, and it had been completely empty. The ringing of the slot machines faded as he retraced his steps from earlier—halfway down the row of shops to Fox Creek’s bare-bones “Business Suite,” a windowless room with a fax machine, copier, and desktop computers for hotel guests. Smiles dipped his card key into the lock and entered.

  Just like earlier, the room was barren. Ben followed Smiles in, still sulking, and dropped into one of the plastic chairs. Smiles made sure the door was closed before joining him by the computers. “Cheer up, man. I got it all figured out.”

  “Smiles, let’s just get a coffee,” Ben said. “There’s nothing to figure out. You can’t, like, fix this.”

  “No, no, that’s where you’re wrong. Look, you’ve been totally freaked out, and I can see why. You’ve got this dangerous thing, and you don’t want it getting into the wrong hands, right?”

  Ben nodded unenthusiastically.

  “Just listen,” Smiles said. “Tell me: Why don’t you just give the thing to the government?”

  Ben sparked to life at that. “’Cause then they’d know I have it, Smiles. That makes me dangerous, too. Who knows what they’d do to me?”

  “Right,” Smiles said quickly, and he could see that Ben was surprised he’d thought it out even this far. Ben probably thought Smiles’s big idea was just handing his algorithm over to the government, but it was so much better than that. “Look, here’s what you’re going to do. You are going to give the government your algorithm. But you’re going to do it anonymously—through me. They’ll never e
ven know who you are. And you’re not just going to give it to them, Ben. You’re going to sell it to them.”

  Selling it—that was the revelation Smiles had had at the blackjack table. It had come to him after listening to Erin talk about how the government would pay big bucks for just one stupid prime number. It was all upside: Ben would get paid, and he wouldn’t have the entire weight of his discovery on his shoulders for the rest of his life. And if Smiles helped Ben pull it off, it would only be fair for him to get a taste of the action. It would be his own way.

  And they wouldn’t have to worry about it messing with Alyce Systems, either. The government knew how to keep this kind of stuff secret. That’s what the guy at the microphone had said that morning—the NSA was like a black hole, keeping as much information about encryption to itself as possible.

  If they pulled it off, the payday could be huge. The Clay Institute was putting up $1 million for a solution to the Riemann Hypothesis, and Ben’s discovery was way more valuable than that. Smiles had done some research and found more than one organization offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who discovered a really large prime number. That much for a single prime number, and Ben had the key to all of them! Plus, those organizations didn’t have the resources of the government, which had offered $25 million for Osama bin Laden.

  So yeah, if they did this right, Ben was in for a payday. And Smiles could save his dad’s company from becoming obsolete.

  He felt like the businessman in the generic poster on the wall, celebrating some executive triumph with a fist raised in the air. The actual dude in the poster was probably just an out-of-work actor. His suit didn’t fit and his cell phone was the size of a brick. Still, the poster said SUCCESS, and Smiles felt it in his bones.

  Ben had that look he got when he turned inward, thinking furiously, twirling the mighty gears of his brain. Still, he wasn’t rejecting the idea outright. Smiles leaned in for the kill.

  “It’s perfect, right? We put your algorithm in safe hands, we keep you anonymous, and we get you paid. You totally deserve it. I mean, you started this whole thing trying to get that million-dollar prize, right?”