The Cipher

by John C. Ford

Andrei Tarasov had a son?

  “Melanie? Are you okay?” Her English teacher, Mr. Hardy, was calling down the hallway. “You left your books.”

  It took Melanie a moment to find her voice. “Yes, thank you.” She rushed into the classroom and grabbed up her book bag so Mr. Hardy could lock up.

  “Cross-country practice today?” he said as she breezed out the door.

  “Off to it now.”

  But who was she kidding? Melanie couldn’t let it go—she was heading straight to Northeastern.

  229

  IN NINE MINUTES, Smiles was supposed to meet the agents at the Prudential Center to get Ben back. But instead of being there, he was in a dusty corner of some academic building at Northeastern, talking to a small wizard. That’s what the guy looked like, anyway, with his shrunken frame and mane of white hair. He actually looked pretty much the same as in the picture Melanie had left on the nightstand, which made it easy to spot him as Smiles ran down the hallway.

  From his doorway, Smiles had spewed out a frantic explanation for his presence before Professor Worth cut him off and insisted he have a seat. The water cooler behind his desk burped as the professor drew water from it. He passed a small Styrofoam cup to Smiles, now sitting on a couch that had probably gone in and out of style a few times since the 1950s.

  The professor stood by while Smiles downed the water.

  “I can see him in you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your father.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Just go slowly and tell me why you’re here,” Professor Worth said, refilling the water for Smiles and then taking a seat behind the desk.

  “Okay, well, let me start with this.” Smiles had brought the critical items with him. He pulled out the algorithm and the thumb drive from his pockets.

  “Do you know anything about codes, sir?”

  The professor laughed a phlegmy laugh. Pretty soon the guy was doubled over. His wrinkled arm raised in a thumbs-up gesture and he returned upright, red-faced but smiling. “Don’t mind that. Standard operating procedure,” he said. “Go on, please.”

  “Uh, codes?”

  “Right right right. If you’ll allow an old man to be immodest, I know an awful lot about codes.”

  Sounded like a yes. Smiles passed over the page from Ben’s notebook. “Could you possibly tell me what that is?”

  Professor Worth looked at it for about a second. “I most assuredly can. This, young man, is a bunch of gibberish.”

  “Gibberish? Somebody told me it was an algorithm to, uh, fast-factor the, uh . . .”

  “The product of two primes?”

  “Right.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t that be marvelous!” Professor Worth was beaming. “But no. That particular mystery eludes us still. This is just a random string of math-looking symbols. As I say, gibberish.”

  “It was supposed to be on this drive, too,” Smiles said, almost embarrassed to have him try it.

  “Let us see,” Professor Worth said, and placed the thumb drive in his computer. He clicked around for a while and swiveled back to Smiles. “Would you like to hazard a guess?”

  “Gibberish?”

  “Got it in one.”

  Smiles still couldn’t wrap his mind around it. He had been right there when they tested the algorithm. He had seen it work . . .

  You didn’t see anything. You heard Ben read back a bunch of random numbers. Then you gave them to the agent, who was in on it, too.

  It didn’t matter that he was going to be late to the Prudential Center, because no one was going to be there. There was never any threat to Alyce Systems, because Ben hadn’t discovered anything. All he’d done was find a sucker, and then stolen $7 million from him.

  It hurt, but it also gave him clarity. Ben wasn’t simply a thief; he was the son of Andrei Eltsin. Smiles had to find out the truth about that man if he was ever going to have any peace. “You knew my dad, sir?”

  “Very well. We worked at Harvard together, on projects of some not insignificant import.”

  Another convoluted yes. “Something happened to me this weekend, sir. This might sound strange, but did you know Rose, too? Rose Carlisle?”

  Professor Worth tipped back in his chair. “I did. And I’ll confess, I’m afraid of what your next question is going to be.”

  “Did she tell you anything about a man named—”

  “Andrei?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My dear boy.” Professor Worth hacked into his fist, and Smiles feared the rambling soliloquy sure to follow. “Before you tread any further into these murky waters, I would ask you—”

  “Professor, I have to thank you for talking to me, and the water, and everything. But I really need to know what my mom—Rose—told you about that guy.”

  “Yes, I understand. You’re a determined young man. And you have a right to ask your questions, however troubling the answers may be.” Professor Worth cleared his throat. “Rose knew of me from my work with your father at Harvard. Years ago, she came to me with a notebook.”

  “A notebook?” Smiles remembered the strange thing his dad had told him: that there would be a “package” along with the letter from his mom. Not a regular gift, he had said. It’s a notebook. The letter might be gone, but maybe this notebook still existed somewhere. Maybe it had answers.

  “Yes,” Professor Worth said. “A notebook. She wanted me to look at it, and I did.”

  “Why? What was in it?”

  Professor Worth shook his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t. If you really want to know, you’ll have to get that from the person who came here with Ms. Carlisle.”

  Smiles waited. Professor Worth swallowed.

  “It was your mother, dear boy. Alice Taft, once Alice Smylie.”

  “My mother?”

  Professor Worth eased back in his chair. “Yes. She’s been trying to get you on the phone today, hasn’t she?”

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “We’ve been in contact, you see. As you no doubt know, on Saturday I got a call from Marshall Hunt’s daughter, a terribly nice-sounding young lady. And, well, I knew then that these old matters had resurrected themselves. So your mother and I have been talking, and frankly your visit here is not entirely unexpected. I’m rather of a mind that it would be far better for you to leave the matter be.”

  It’s better left alone, Smiles could hear his mom saying.

  “I can see, though, that you want to get your information,” Professor Worth continued, “and your mother is willing to provide it.”

  “That’d be a change,” Smiles said.

  “Yes, I understand you had a rather unpleasant meeting at the conference?”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “You should know, son, that life has been extremely unfair to your mother. Much less fair than it has been to you. Believe me when I say she only wants the best for you.”

  Smiles didn’t want to hear it. If she really wanted the best for him, she could have helped him out at Fox Creek. She could have stuck around until his third birthday.

  “So does she have this notebook?” Smiles said.

  “She’s getting it right now, as it happens. And she told me that if you came poking around here, I should send you over.”

  “Over where?”

  “To the bank, son. To the safe deposit box where it’s been sitting for years.”

  233

  MELANIE ALMOST CRASHED into Smiles. He was bursting from Professor Worth’s office just as she was arriving, and he looked dangerously pale. Melanie felt an awkward smile on her face as they backed away from each other in the hallway.

  “Hey. I thought I might as well come down,” she said. “See what all this is about.”

  “Yeah, uh, thanks.” Melanie had wondered if it would
be weird between them, but it felt sort of good. It was like seeing her best friend from grade school. “Can you walk with me?” Smiles said. “I think I’m about to find out.”

  “Yeah,” Melanie said, but she didn’t even know if he was listening anymore. He was race-walking down the hallway and then out of the small building that held Professor Worth’s office, a three-story outpost on Northeastern’s campus in the South End. Melanie had a little laugh to herself when she saw his Infiniti parked illegally right in front of the entrance. Nobody got more parking tickets than Smiles.

  “I’ve got to find my mother,” Smiles said.

  “Your . . . mother?” It took her back to that terrible conversation at the kabob place. The conversation that had started everything.

  “Alice, yeah. She has the notebook I was supposed to get, and it’s the reason all of this happened.”

  “Oh, okay.” Melanie didn’t want to touch the topic of his biological mother—it would be safer to douse herself in water and tap dance on the third rail of the T. “No offense, but you look sorta worn out. Want me to drive?” She used to drive them everywhere.

  Smiles balled up the parking ticket and stuffed it in his pocket. “Thanks, but this is kind of my thing. Come with me, though, if you want.”

  Melanie spotted her right away—she looked just like him. Or he looked just like her. They had the same features: the spread of their eyes, the wide mouth. At the same time, they didn’t look like each other at all. His hair was floppy and wild, hers short and neat. The traits she liked about Smiles—the openness of his face, the calm of his eyes—were different on his mom. It wasn’t quite a scowl that she wore, but it was in the neighborhood.

  The security guard had been standing at the front entrance as they came in, waiting out the last minutes before he could lock up. They had slipped in just in time, swimming against a current of exiting bank customers. And then, down the length of the bank, right in front of the safe deposit area, they saw her standing in a tailored red jacket.

  “Oh, wow,” Melanie said, jarred by the resemblance.

  “C’mon,” Smiles said, and they walked down the grand room to his mother. The formality of the place felt appropriate somehow—like some kind of sacred ceremony was about to take place. Melanie stayed half a step back from Smiles. This was his thing, and she was going to have to fight her instinct to protect him every step of the way. His mom watched them coming, freakishly composed—her posture rigid, her clothes immaculate, her face stoic.

  When they reached her, Melanie saw the tiniest fracture in her composure. Her face relaxed by a single degree, and her lips dropped from their fixed position on her face. It was the saddest smile Melanie had ever seen.

  “Hello.” The odd detachment of her voice wasn’t a surprise. She didn’t offer as much as a handshake. This woman made icebergs look warm.

  “This is Melanie,” Smiles said with a hollow voice.

  “Not Melanie Hunt?” Melanie nodded, and she saw the fracture deepen another bit. “I knew you once,” she said. “As a baby.”

  They were almost alone in the bank now. In a few minutes they would get kicked out. “I need to know something,” Smiles began, and just then the door that said SAFE DEPOSITS opened up behind them. A man emerged—the name tag on his lapel said PERRY.

  “Shall we, Alice?” the man said, before noticing Smiles and Melanie. “Oh my, Mr. Smylie. Smiles, that is. What a delight. You didn’t have to get that signature so quickly.”

  “It’s not that,” Smiles said, then turned to his mom. “Just tell me. Do you have this notebook, whatever it is?”

  Mr. Perry leaned farther out the door in his eagerness to serve. “Everything okay there, folks?”

  “Give us a moment,” Melanie said, hanging on the exchange in front of her. She had to see this notebook, too. Somehow, she knew, it would explain everything that had been going on all weekend.

  “Are you sure you want to—” his mother started.

  “I need to know.” Smiles’s voice was hot.

  His mother drew her jacket tight against her trim body. She sniffed and said, “Yes, well, I have the notebook. I’ve kept it in a safe deposit box here for years. The letter I left for your eighteenth birthday, it told you that you’re authorized to access it.”

  “I never got the letter,” Smiles said harshly.

  His mother’s mouth twitched, and Melanie sensed that it was taking great effort now to maintain her rigorous self-control. “Well, let’s go then,” she said softly.

  She nodded to Mr. Perry, and they followed him down a corridor to a series of caged areas. The size of walk-in closets, each was ringed with safe deposit boxes and had a block in the center like a kitchen island. “We’re all very excited about the IPO tomorrow,” Mr. Perry said breezily as they went, somehow oblivious to the unbearable waves of stress crashing between Smiles and his mother. One last time Melanie had to resist holding Smiles’s hand, stepping ahead, doing whatever she could to shield him from the damage his mom inflicted on him.

  Mr. Perry opened one of the cages and escorted them inside—Smiles and his mother first, then Melanie, then another bank guard who had appeared at the rear of the group. With a large ring of keys in his hand, Mr. Perry scanned a row of boxes at the back of the claustrophobic cage.

  “Where are you now?” he mumbled to himself as he went along. “Ahh, there.” Alice joined him at the box he’d singled out, and they both inserted keys into the wide, shallow safe deposit box. It was just like Melanie’s dad had explained Alyce’s encryption system to her when she was little—how you needed the two keys to unlock the code.

  Mr. Perry left the box on the island, gave a short bow, and left wordlessly. The guard pulled a curtain across the opening of the cage to give them privacy. Melanie could see the backs of his shoes below the curtain, standing watch in the hallway.

  “There it is,” his mother said. She held a palm up toward the safe deposit box. Removed from the wall, it was less a box than a tray, open at the top. The thing lying inside looked like a parcel you might get in the mail. Smiles walked up to the box, keeping his hands carefully away from the package for the moment. His face was bloodless.

  He looked to Melanie. She gave him a nod of encouragement, stepping forward to look on with him. Finally, Smiles grasped the package. As he pulled it out of the box, they could see that one end of it was open. Melanie inched right up to the island as Smiles reached in and pulled out another parcel-looking package.

  This one had an address and postmark on it. It had been sent to Andrei Eltsin, at a Boston address. “Smiles, that . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  She remembered plugging it into her GPS, driving down the sad little street with the market at the end.

  “That’s where he lived.”

  “He mailed that package to himself,” his mom said. “He did it to prove that the idea in there was his. The postmark establishes the date.”

  Smiles turned the package, and in the faded black ink of the postmark they could see that it had been mailed on a December day almost twenty years ago.

  The gummy flap at the top of the package was loose. This was it—he was going to find out everything in a second. Melanie took a long breath to slow her beating heart.

  Smiles peeled away the flap.

  Inside was a thin spiral notebook, still new-looking. The red cover wasn’t scratched at all. When Smiles flicked the pages, they appeared empty. But then he turned back to the front, and Melanie saw what was written on the top line of the first page:

  A SYSTEM FOR ASYMMETRICAL ENCRYPTION

  Melanie held fast to the table. She knew enough about Alyce to understand what it meant, and now she wished that she had held Smiles’s hand, that she had taken charge, that she had protected him. She wished that she had pulled him out of the bank ten minutes ago, because she didn’t want him seeing this.
<
br />   No one said a word. Slowly, Smiles ran a finger across the mathematical process etched onto the page in the hand of Andrei Tarasov. He knew, too.

  It was his dad’s breakthrough. His special encryption system. The entire foundation for Alyce Systems, and all the wealth that followed.

  “Your father stole it,” his mother said.

  239

  SMILES HAD GONE numb.

  It was like hearing the doctors tell him about his dad’s cancer. It was worse than that. It was like hearing his mom had died.

  Across the island, Melanie spun the notebook to her, disbelieving. “Tarasov . . . My dad said he made everything up.”

  “He didn’t,” Smiles’s mother said in that clinical way. “This is the proof. This is the basis for the technology Alyce Systems uses. It is the technology.”

  A shadow moved under the curtain, and the guard’s voice said, “Folks, we can give you about five more minutes there, that’s it.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Melanie called behind her.

  His mother took the notebook and the packaging and placed them all in Smiles’s hands. “You know the truth now.”

  Smiles’s brain fought it like an infection. “How did you even get this?”

  “The night that man killed himself, he left this package at our front door. I was alone with you at the house. I was the one who received it.”

  “And . . . what? You knew what this meant somehow?”

  His mother smoothed her jacket, attempting patience. “Of course I knew what it meant. I’m a mathematician, a very good one. I was involved in your dad’s company from the start. It’s named after me. So yes, as soon as I opened it, I knew that it meant your father had stolen that man’s work.”

  Her eyes challenged his, and Smiles felt a flame inside himself. “And so you left? That was your solution?”

  Her head bowed, and Smiles enjoyed the feeling of breaking her down. Suddenly, he wanted to punish this woman for everything she’d ever done.

  “I did a terrible thing in leaving you,” she said. Her voice had lost its polish. She was all cracks and shards, broken pieces of herself. “I did an absolutely unforgivable thing, and it haunts me every single day. But when I found out what your father had done, it changed everything for me. I couldn’t stay with him, couldn’t live off a stolen fortune. But I wasn’t strong enough to take you with me, not then. Your father is a resourceful man—he would have made it very difficult for us to leave together.”