by John C. Ford
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.
103
“SMILES!” SHE YELLED. Her arm waved for his attention.
Smiles trott
ed over, floating across the lobby like he was being pulled on a life preserver. In the rush of events he had almost forgotten about her. Now he had someone to get answers from—even if she did have an ass of a boyfriend, and even if that boyfriend was sitting right across from her in another muscle shirt. He drank from a gigantic cup filled with some kind of frilly drink. Strands of chocolate topping crisscrossed the foam just so.
“Hey, what happened to you?” Smiles said to Erin. “Where’d you go?”
Erin threw a cautious glance at Zach before answering. Probably smart to be careful, but Smiles was beyond that. He needed as much information as he could get.
“Ben sent me down here,” she said. “Did he ask you to come get me?”
“Come get you? No. Listen, just tell me what happened. It’s really important.”
“Smiles . . .” Erin had her messenger bag over her shoulder again. She ducked under the strap, put it on her seat, and stood close enough to whisper.
“What’s going on?” Zach yelped.
“Don’t worry about it.” It felt good to vent his anger—especially on that guy. He wondered why Erin had even been sitting with him, after their fight the night before.
“Actually, I am worried about it,” Zach said.
He sounded like the kind of guy who could have done the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I routine for hours without losing interest. It was about the last thing that Smiles needed.
Erin placed a warning hand on Smiles’s arm.
“Just sit there and enjoy your cocoa,” he said.
That did it. Zach’s chair toppled behind him as he rose. “You want to do this?”
“I do,” Smiles said. “And yet I’m busy. Rain check?”
The other customers were noticing now, peeling their eyes from laptops and cell phones. Erin pushed Smiles gently away, extending her other arm to keep Zach at bay.
“Don’t get into it with him, okay?”
Smiled edged away, far enough to talk without Zach hearing. “They took Ben this morning. I need to know what you saw.”
“They took him? What do you mean?”
“I mean they took him. They frog-marched him out of here. They didn’t give us a dime and they took Ben and the cipher. This is real, and Ben’s in trouble.”
As he said it, Smiles realized he didn’t have any more time to waste. He needed to get to a phone that couldn’t be traced to him immediately. The business center would do.
Erin was shaking her head, trying to absorb it. “He was so nervous this morning. He told me to—”
“I gotta call the police now,” Smiles said. “Will you be here?”
Erin looked between Smiles and Zach, struggling with the choice. “Smiles . . .”
He didn’t wait for the rest of it.
He raced down the hallway, turning past the Gucci store and into the darkened nook that led to the business center. As usual, it was empty. As usual, there was something fake and pitiful about its flimsy reproduction of office life. No wonder people preferred the luxury stores. The man in the SUCCESS poster looked happy as ever, but this time he seemed to be mocking Smiles, ready to strike him over the head with his enormous cell phone.
Smiles grabbed some Kleenex by the coffeemaker. He used one tissue to pick up the receiver, and another to protect his finger as he dialed 911.
“Emergency services, where are you located?” A man this time, equally harried.
“I’m at the Fox Creek casino, but that’s not really—”
The pounding stopped him. The door had a rectangular window set into it, and on the other side Erin was flailing away. He dropped the phone and opened the door.
“What is it?”
She paused before she spoke, breathless from effort.
“Smiles, I have the cipher. I have the only copy.”
107
“YOU HAVE THE cipher?”
“Yeah. The only copy. If those agents took Ben, they don’t have it.”
Smiles couldn’t make sense of her words. “How’d you get it?”
Erin eyed the phone lying on the carpet. “Who were you calling?”
“911. Erin, I don’t get it . . .”
He was picturing Ben, so crazy and paranoid and yet so trusting. Smiles thought he was ridiculous for keeping his bag locked up. And yet when he got scared the night before, he spilled everything to Erin. Smiles could understand why. There was something true in her honey-colored eyes, something about the scar on her cheek that said life would hurt you but it would be okay. If it turned out she had stolen Ben’s algorithm, Smiles was never going to have faith in anyone again.
Erin crossed the room and hung up the phone. She returned to Smiles and took his hands. She stood upright before him in her white sundress; her hands warmed his from underneath. Stripped of her messenger bag, with a wisp of golden hair falling across her forehead, she looked like a spring bride. She was calming him down, and it was working magnificently.
“Tell me what happened,” he said. “We need to do something quick.”
“I know.” She underlined her words, letting him know she understood the urgency. It was the voice of the warm bath, the one that did everything but tuck him in bed. She drew him back to the chairs by the computer terminals.
“I didn’t know what to say out there. With people around and Zach—”
“Just tell me,” Smiles said. “Forget Zach.”
Her eyes softened. She curled her fingers tight into his. “Okay, here’s what happened. I was there in the room while you guys tested the cipher. When the last number didn’t work, Ben flipped out. I know you were on the phone, but in person it was scary. He went nuts, Smiles.”
“I can sorta imagine,” Smiles said, thinking of Ben’s display at the opening session. “He has Asperger’s, you know?”
“I didn’t, but yeah, I can see it,” she said. “So after you hung up, he wigged. I’m not sure if it was the fact that the last number didn’t work or he was just nervous about the whole thing in general. Anyway, he stored the cipher on a thumb drive and deleted the memory from his netbook. He gave me the thumb drive and the page from his notebook and told me to go downstairs. I tried to tell him it’d be okay, to stick to your plan. But he was sure something was off, and he didn’t want anybody getting that thing.”
Smiles nodded. Erin might have been thrown by Ben’s actions, but they made perfect sense. Ben had it in his brain that something was going to go wrong. The kid had a stubborn way about him, and once he got something fixed in his head, it took a jackhammer to dislodge it.
“It all seemed crazy to me, but in a way I wasn’t worried about it because the algorithm didn’t even work.”
Smiles didn’t bother correcting her for the moment. Against the wall, a printer whirred to life and began spitting out pages. The room filled with the smell of toner.
“He wanted to be a hundred percent sure things were cool before he gave anybody the algorithm. So the deal was, I was supposed to hang down here until he knew things were kosher. He was going to call me if you guys needed it for the exchange. But he never called. I wasn’t really expecting him to, either, to be honest.”
“Because you thought it didn’t work,” Smiles said.
“Right. Wait, what? It did work?”
“Yeah. The last number was just a test.”
Erin’s mouth fell open. “Oh my God. A fast-factoring algorithm . . .”
“They played us,” Smiles said. “They had us the whole time. After we tested the algorithm, the NSA agent sent a text on his phone. The other agent must have been waiting for the signal. By the time I got back to the room, they’d taken him. And that room . . . you could almost feel what had happened in there. They wiped the place down with bleach.”
“No trace of Ben . . .” Erin said.
“Yeah. Or the agents. Who knows what they�
�re going to do to him.” Ben was in that van right now. They were bouncing over roads and Ben was tied up in a seat, sweating it out. Probably rocking back and forth with worry. No one in the world knew where he was except those two agents. No one even knew he was in trouble except Smiles and Erin.
“I convinced him to do it,” Smiles said. The confession felt good, and then it poured out of him. “I thought I had this great plan, which now seems like the stupidest thing in the world. I don’t know if Ben even wanted to do it. I kind of forced it on him.”
He leaned back, but Erin locked her fingers around his. “You guys did it together.”
Smiles shook his head. He didn’t want her to make this easy on him. He’d happily take that from anyone else—Melanie made things easy on him all the time—but not Erin. “You don’t know about me, but I’m actually a pretty major screwup—”
“Smiles, shut up for a second, okay?” She gave him a crooked smile. “I’ve gotta tell you something. I’m actually the screwup here.” The printer shut off behind her. Only after it wheezed to a halt did he notice the absence of the sound. The room was fresh with silence.
“I know who you are,” Erin said.
Smiles blinked. “Like, metaphysically?”
“I know you’re Robert Smylie’s son.”
“What? How did you—”
“Zach figured it out.” She shrugged, sorry to even say the name. Smiles was sorry, too. He was done thinking about that guy. “He looks stupid, but he’s not. I actually met him at the University of Maine. I was taking a class on linear algebra that they don’t have at my high school. He was this macho ROTC guy, seemed like the only normal human there.” She shook her head, getting back on track. “Anyway, he’s been a nut about Alyce Systems for a long time, even before all the IPO stuff. He’s read your dad’s business book, like, five times.”