by John C. Ford
Melanie’s taillights brightened first, then Mr. Hunt’s. He drove a Bentley with white leather seats and an exterior blue color that was probably called something like Sapphire Dreams. It started up like distant thunder.
Smiles lurched toward the Bentley, his chance for an explanation escaping. “Mr. Hunt, wait. What are you doing here? What’s going on!?”
Mr. Hunt ignored him. The Bentley slipped away, and Melanie followed. Smiles caught her eyes as she backed out. They were empty. A corner of her mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile—she was holding off a cry.
“Mel, wait! What’s the deal?”
Erin held him back by the shoulder. “Let ’em go, Smiles.”
He did.
At least Operation Hot Tub was working. They had scraped together a dinner of hard pretzels and gourmet mustard and spent most of the night on the deck. At full dark Smiles told her it’d be a shame to let a good hot tub go to waste, and Erin had gone for it.
She dipped her shoulders under the water, giving him eyes with unfathomable sex appeal. Still, she kept to the opposite side of the hot tub, holding her distance. “So you know how I said I have a big ego?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s one fault. There’s another one you should probably be aware of. I’m pretty good with the old self-sabotage routine. When I start thinking I might really like somebody? I start finding problems that aren’t there. Like, just for instance, maybe criticizing their perfectly healthy and actually kind of adorable interest in domesticated fish.”
“Ahhhh. Good, ’cause I like them.”
“Right. So maybe if you could just wipe that episode from the record books? Or file it under Erin’s Endearing Quirks or something?”
“Done,” he said. “Any more faults I should know about?”
She pondered the stars theatrically. “Nope. Other than that, I am perfection.”
“Just as I thought,” he said, and then they were kissing. Eventually she pushed away from him with her feet.
“You never answered me earlier,” she said.
“What?”
“About that girl. Wish you were still with her?”
“Nah,” Smiles said. And actually, he didn’t. Which was kind of weird. He’d known Melanie forever, lusted after her for almost as long. He wasn’t feeling the need to be with her anymore, though, and Erin was the reason. She stretched her arms out along the lip of the hot tub. Her hair pooled at her shoulders, waving in the bubbling water.
“So why am I the lucky one? I want to hear it. Flatter me.” She blinked her eyes at him, playing cute.
“Uh, you know, I’m not really good at talking about this stuff. I mean, why does anybody like anybody? You can’t put it in words. You just do.”
“Well, try. Because that last answer isn’t doing much for me.” She flicked water from her fingertips at him.
Smiles looked up at the stars, brighter out here than they ever were in Boston. The stars at Squam Lake always reminded him of the laser light show he’d gone to the first time he got truly stoned. He was feeling that kind of disoriented now. He was definitely into this girl, and if he wanted things to keep going well, he probably should give her some kind of answer.
“Okay, well, it’s sort of hard to be with Melanie. It’s, like, work. Not because she’s high maintenance or anything. She’s just this perfect girl, so it feels extra-bad if you’re not winning the Nobel Peace Prize or something. It’s different with you. You’re . . .” Smiles reached for the rest of the sentence, realizing he’d painted himself into a corner.
“Far from perfect? Deeply flawed? Perhaps this is where we should review the meaning of ‘flatter.’ Would that be helpful?”
At least she was smiling. “Hey, I warned you I’d be bad at this,” he said.
“Not this bad.”
“Well, I always like to exceed expectations.” Smiles pushed off from the wall and moved gently across the water. He grasped her hands and Erin pulled to the edge of the seat, their bodies half floating close to each other beneath the wisps of steam. “Okay, here goes,” he said. “You know how I said I was a screwup? I meant that. I got kicked out of school last fall and pretty much have no clue where my life is going. My plans last for about twenty minutes each. Know why I can’t settle on anything?”
Erin waited to hear it.
“Because the only thing that I’ve ever really wanted to do was to run my dad’s company. It’s been stuck in my head since I was little. It seems pretty dumb now, ’cause I don’t know anything about computers or encryption or any of that. But it’s all I could ever seriously imagine myself doing.”
“So why don’t you—”
Smiles shook his head. “I’m not gonna, like, go to college and, you know, cut to a Rocky montage of me studying up at night and turning into a brain. I’m not smart like that, but that doesn’t even matter. The point is, I’ve had that idea fixed in my mind since I could walk. And I’ve always held on to a sliver of it. But when we were in Mr. Hunt’s office, he told me it’s not happening. For sure. None of my dad’s stock is going to me—none of it. I’m not going to have anything to do with the company at all.”
Erin rubbed her hand along his arm, but Smiles didn’t need to be soothed. “I’m not telling you for sympathy. I’ve known for a long time that my dad doesn’t trust me like that—this just makes it official. I’m telling you because I can. If I said this to Melanie, it would just make me feel worse.
“I don’t feel judged by you, understand?” he said. “I don’t feel like you’re waiting for me to screw up. I don’t know how that sounds to you, but for me it’s pretty awesome.”
Erin nudged off the seat and hugged him. She whispered in his ear, “Oh, Smiles, you just exceeded my expectations.”
She was waiting for him in the master bedroom. Smiles had stayed down in the kitchen, insisting on cleaning up their plates before they went to bed. Better to do it now than early tomorrow morning, when they’d have to get on the road to the bank. That’s what he’d said, and it was true. But he was also thinking of Melanie’s strange appearance at the cabin, and all those calls she’d left on his phone. Something real was happening with Erin tonight, and Smiles had a feeling that he owed it to Melanie to hear her out before things went any further.
He put the last dish away and dialed voice mail, cringing inside. A string of messages in which Melanie stated her desperate case for getting back together weren’t going to make fun listening. He shouldn’t have been worried; in the three voice mails she’d left, she hadn’t brought up their relationship once.
Instead, Smiles listened gape-jawed as Melanie’s static-ridden voice told him what she’d been up to the last couple of days. The girl had gone nuts. First, she had broken into his mom’s email account and found some old messages to both his birth mother and Mr. Hunt. They all had to do with the letter Smiles was supposed to get on his eighteenth birthday and/or some ex-Alyce employee named Andrei Tarasov, who had shot himself on Smiles’s front lawn years ago. Because all of that wasn’t bizarre enough, Melanie had contacted some professor at Northeastern and was planning to skip school to meet him on Monday. In the meantime, she had decided to go AWOL and hole up at his dad’s cabin for the weekend while she tried to figure it all out. Unbelievable.
The skipping class part, actually, might have been the strangest of all.
A grin crossed Smiles’s face. He had to hand it to Melanie—it sounded like she’d stirred up a bunch of trouble. Not that he could begin to grasp what it all meant. It was definitely weird that Smiles had never heard about this guy who offed himself, but that sounded like ancient history. Plus, through Melanie’s frantic voice mails, it was difficult to draw any connection between the guy and the letter from his mom. Which Mr. Hunt had destroyed, anyway.
He’d looked pretty pissed off when he handed Smiles the keys to the cabin. That scen
e at the front of the house made more sense now; Melanie and her friend were being involuntarily returned from their weekend frolic as detectives/runaways.
Smiles’s finger hovered over the phone, readying to call Melanie. What was the use, though? She’d broken up with him, end of story. At some point, Smiles would talk to her again and find out more about the suicide guy. But for the next twenty-four hours, he had to worry about getting his money from the bank, getting the cipher, getting Ben back, and saving Alyce Systems.
And right now there was a hot girl lying on a bed upstairs, waiting for him. Smiles took his hand away from the phone and headed for the bedroom.
“A single idea—the sudden flash of a thought—may be worth a million dollars.”
—Robert Collier
MONDAY
“Money often costs too much.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
179
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER absurdly early start. The early wake-ups were getting ridiculous, but Smiles didn’t see any way around it. If they had any delays along the way, they were going to have to haul ass to get Ben by four o’clock. First they had to go to Boston to get the money, then backtrack an hour north to York, Maine, where Zach had demanded they meet for the cipher exchange. (“He stays close to home,” Erin had said. “That trip to Fox Creek might as well have been a European vacation.”) Then back downtown to the Prudential Center to meet the agents and Ben. If Smiles managed to pull this off, he was going to sleep for a month.
The number of details Smiles had to keep straight had almost overwhelmed him. First thing after getting up, he’d sat down at the kitchen table and written out a list with phone numbers and meeting times for Zach, the agents, and Mr. Perry (the banker dude); his Swiss bank account details; and whatever other scraps of information might come in handy. The exercise calmed him down enough to close up the cabin pretty well as the sun rose over the lake.
Now they were cruising south on I–93, and thankfully Erin was staying awake for the ride. Smiles never thought it would be possible, but he might have gotten his fill of driving the Infiniti at this point.
“Do you realize what Ben did?” Erin said, cracking her window on a gray stretch of highway past Concord. “To a mathematician, solving the Riemann Hypothesis is like finding the cure for cancer. And Ben’s discovery, it’s almost more of a breakthrough than that. I’m not exaggerating to make a point. That’s the best actual comparison I can think of.”
“You know,” Smiles said, “I don’t think I actually do realize what Ben did. I mean, I can’t really appreciate it. It’s like telling someone from Mongolia that somebody broke Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. They’re not going to get it, no matter how hard they try.”
“Who’s Joe DiMaggio?”
Smiles turned in disbelief, but she’d made a pistol of her finger and was pointing it at him.
“Anyway,” Smiles said, “not appreciating the brilliant people in my life is something I seem to excel at, so it’s par for the course.”
Erin took his hand, and they drove in silence for ten miles before she said, “He’s in bad shape, huh?”
“Yeah. Worst he’s ever been.”
Erin turned sideways and played her finger along his ear. “Well, you know, I’m incredibly brilliant, and you seem to appreciate me.”
The good feeling lasted all the way to the bank.
The whole procedure lasted only half an hour. They parked in a downtown structure and crossed the street to Third Boston Bank, the exterior of which had round gray columns of a reassuring thickness. It was one of those old banks, with its name actually etched into the stone and a long double row of wooden desks opposite the brass teller windows. The desks were filled with people in business suits who would have been right at home in a library, considering the obvious effort they made to stay quiet. Someone’s desk phone went off, and the ringer sounded like a sonar pulse from a submarine movie. Chewing gum probably got you fired on the spot.
The sound of Erin’s flip-flops echoed through the tall open space, which didn’t have any other customers in it yet. Smiles and Erin had been the first, arriving just as a security guard was unlocking the double doors at the front of the bank. A reed-thin man looked up at the thwacking sound of Erin’s footsteps, and Smiles saw the name PERRY on his gold name tag.
“Mr. Perry?”
“Yes. You would be Mr. Smylie, then?”
Smiles almost said no. “Uh, yeah, but everybody calls me Smiles.”
Nicholas Perry found that extremely amusing. “Okay, then,” he said, with a smile still frozen on his face. “Let’s have a seat and see what we can do for you, Smiles.” The guy couldn’t get past the idea that some human beings have nicknames.
They followed him to a desk in the back row, away from the bank entrance. Smiles wondered if they intentionally kept Nicholas Perry as far from the public as possible. “Now, you said you have an amendment of some kind, allowing you access to the full trust?”
“Uh, right.” Smiles panicked for a second, but luckily he was wearing the same pants from yesterday and still had it in his back pocket. He had folded the page into quarters, and it held the curve of his butt cheek as he dropped it on the desk.
Mr. Perry picked it up gingerly, humming as he examined it. “Yes, well, I made some inquires about this after your call yesterday. To Mr. Hunt, of course, and then to your father.” Smiles wondered if that was normal. He tried to imagine Nicholas Perry conducting his high-level financial queries while Junior blew out his three candles and opened his presents. “They seemed to know about this arrangement, and your father verified that he had signed the addendum. Third Boston is very proud to have your father’s business, I should add.” Mr. Perry suddenly turned grave. “We’re all very sorry about his condition.”
It was nice of him and everything, but what do you say to that? Thanks?
“Thanks,” Smiles said.
Mr. Perry nodded and hid behind the page again. Finally, he slapped it down onto his desk blotter, raised his eyebrows, and said, “So you want the whole amount, then?”
“Uh, that’s right.”
“Okay, well since you called yesterday, I came in early to get things moving. Let’s see where we are with the check. One moment.”
Mr. Perry got up and scurried to a door that said SAFE DEPOSITS. He punched a code in a keypad and darted inside when the door clicked open.
“That’s it?” Smiles said to Erin. “I figured they’d, like, want my fingerprints or something.”
“I do believe that’s your guilty conscience speaking,” she said. “You’re not here on a trespassing charge—you’re here to get your own money.” Erin rested her flip-flops on the desk and leaned her head back, taking in the impossibly tall ceiling.
Smiles snuck a glimpse of the tight curves of her body, ill-hidden beneath her T-shirt and jean shorts. He wondered how a girl with legs like that could really be so into math. “So you actually like that math stuff, huh?”
“And that,” Erin said, pointing to him, “is your chauvinist pig speaking.”
She may have had a point. Smiles grabbed a Third Boston pen from Mr. Perry’s collection, just for something to do. Erin released her feet and the front legs of her chair dropped to the floor. “It’s pretty easy to get excited about math, actually. Especially codes.”
Smiles hummed noncommittally.
“Think about having an idea like Ben had—how exciting it would be. Or your dad,” she said. “He’s sitting there one day, and then all of a sudden he’s figured out how to do asymmetrical encryption over the Internet. Your dad is a freaking genius, Smiles.”
And Smiles had put that genius at risk. For now, he could only pray that he’d get the cipher back before Zach could bring down Alyce with it.
Mr. Perry returned with a smile three counties wide. “Success,” he said, and flopped a large file folder
on his desk. Inside it was a copy of the trust. Mr. Perry fidgeted with the binding for a minute and fixed a copy of the amendment into the back. “Original’s already being messengered to Mr. Hunt,” he said, pleased with himself.
He set the folder aside, revealing underneath it a copy of The Transparent Innovator. “Now, Mr. Smylie—Smiles—I’ve been asked to make a request,” he said cautiously. “It’s from my colleagues, and you should by all means feel free to refuse. But we would be absolutely honored to have your father’s signature on our bank copy of his book. Assuming, of course, that he’s up to that kind of thing.”
It was going to be less trouble just to take it, so Smiles did. “Sure, I can try,” he said.
“That’s wonderful. That’s just wonderful. Everyone here has read it.” Mr. Perry shook his head at his own ramblings. “Anyway, the pièce de résistance.”
With great ceremony, Mr. Perry cleared his throat and detached a check from the page it had been printed on. Before handing it to Smiles, he passed him a single form with three marked places to sign. “There, there, and there, please,” Mr. Perry said, indicating the signature lines with his pen and using his church voice.
When Smiles passed it back, Mr. Perry handed him the check. The final tally: $6,950,000.00. “It’s an awfully pretty number,” Mr. Perry was saying in the background. Smiles’s eyes were feasting on the check, a tingling feeling in his head. It wasn’t the full $7,000,000—Smiles had already gotten the first little payment—but Zach would just have to deal with that.
Erin was tapping lightly on his shoulder. “You okay there?”
He was very okay. He had done it.
“An absolute pleasure meeting you,” Mr. Perry said to them. He rose and shook their hands. “You know what they say, right? Don’t spend it all in one place.”