The Cipher (26 page)

241

MELANIE WATCHED SMILES
carefully as he started up the car. She wouldn't have blamed him for breaking down, or needing to be alone, or wanting to turn the car directly into oncoming traffic. In the short span of fifteen minutes, the burnished image of his father had been utterly demolished.

She didn't know how Smiles could face his dad now, but he was pointing the car toward the hospital. “You mind if we see him?” Smiles said. The first words he'd spoken since leaving the bank.

“No,” Melanie said quietly.

It wasn't just his dad who had been revealed at the bank, either. Melanie now had her own demon.

“Your father wasn't the one who had that letter destroyed,” she said. “My dad did it.”

Melanie was sure of it. He'd done it for the same reason he'd lied to her and Jenna: He didn't want any of this coming out, because it would mean the end of his career as well. He must have known all along that Mr. Smylie had stolen the formula. Still, he'd chosen to go along with it. His entire career was a lie, just as much as Mr. Smylie's was. The truth hit her like a series of punches as they drove in silence to the hospital, parked in the garage, and walked across the skywalk to the cancer center.

Melanie had never been as proud as Smiles as she was at that moment. He kept himself firmly together while she dangled on the edge of sanity right next to him. Their lives had changed drastically in the last half hour, and she wondered how this would affect each of them down the line. But looking at him there, holding himself steady through the push of the crowd in the skywalk, she liked his chances of being okay.

He was never the cracked dish I always imagined him to be
. She thought this as they pushed open the doors of the neuro-oncology center. At the reception desk, a striking woman with manicured dreadlocks offered tender eyes for Smiles. Her name tag said
SHANTI
.

Seeing their disheveled state, she leapt from behind the desk and locked her hands in front of her. “Your dad's okay, but he's in with someone. Let me see if I can clear them out of there. One minute.”

They watched her disappear down the hallway, leaving them standing near a corner of chairs and golf magazines. Everything about the situation was horrible, but Melanie could at least enjoy the fact that her need to mother Smiles had left her entirely.

Shanti returned up the hallway and beckoned them back.

“Go ahead,” Melanie said to Smiles. “I'll wait for you.”

And then she saw the person coming up behind Shanti, the one she'd cleared out of Mr. Smylie's room. It was her dad. He labored over to her, looking sharp in a charcoal suit with subtle pinstripes. Starched white shirt. French cuffs. Gold tie. Ready for the IPO.

“How could you, Dad?” Melanie said.

251

HE LOOKED BETTER
today. He looked much better, but somehow Smiles knew he was close to the end.

Smiles didn't go to his usual seat, the one by the picture of his mom. Instead he walked to his dad's side, pulled away the L-shaped tray with his dinner plate and
Economist
magazine, and took a seat at the edge of the bed. He felt no anger at all.

His dad breathed deeply. “You know, then?”

Smiles nodded. He wondered if his dad remembered their last conversation, when he'd asked if Smiles had seen the package. It didn't matter.

“You told me about the notebook on my birthday. You wanted me to know, didn't you?”

“It's the great burden of my life, that lie.” He looked about the silent room, as if it might offer a way out of his past. “That poor man—”

“Dad, you don't need to.” A group of nurses passed loudly in the hallway. From the next room, Smiles heard the deflating hiss of a machine. He shifted closer to his dad, laying a hand against his leg. “You've been a great father,” he said.

His dad shook his head. “Andrei was a great father. He had a wife and child here, more important to him than anything. He snuck back into the country just to be with them.” His eyes had gone away somewhere, going over the thoughts of Andrei Eltsin that must have plagued him his whole life. His father waved a weak hand toward the green screen. Tomorrow morning, the company would go public. Smiles was going to be here for it—he wasn't going to let them put his dad on the screen if he was weak. Smiles was going to protect him to the end.

“The frustration was too much for him,” his dad said, unable to let Andrei Eltsin rest. “Alyce taking off, realizing the potential of his idea. He cracked, or perhaps the State Department found him again. That's when he killed himself.”

Smiles nodded, and saw that his dad's lips were dry and cracked. He passed him a cup of juice from his tray and watched his dad suck at the straw, looking older than Smiles had ever seen him.

“Love of family. That's what I should have taken from him, not his ideas. Family is the most important, remember that.” His dad let the straw go and Smiles returned it to the tray. “When you leave,” his dad said, “will you call Mr. Hunt back here? It doesn't matter how late he comes.”

“Sure, Dad,” Smiles said. He got up and went to the iPod, scrolling through the classical music choices and settling on something from Mozart, his dad's favorite. By the time he looked up, his dad was asleep.

Smiles settled into the seat by the picture of his mom and listened to the whole album there. Every once in a while Shanti stopped at the door to make sure they were okay. When the music stopped playing his dad opened his eyes and found Smiles.

“Good night, Robert,” he said.

257

SMILES HAD FORGOTTEN
about Melanie. But there she was in the softest chair the waiting area had to offer, her feet resting on the table with the magazines, her cheek puffed out on one side. It was her I'm-doing-some-thinking-about-life look.

He was going to have to do a lot of that himself. He knew that what he learned about his dad hadn't really hit him yet. Still, the day had crashed over him violently. And maybe he was just dazed from the impact, but he felt a lightness as he walked over and nudged Melanie's foot. After so much had gone wrong in the absolute worst possible way, anything else he had to face seemed rather small by comparison.

Right now, he had to face Melanie. They'd never really talked after his birthday night, and they needed to clear the air.

Melanie stirred herself upright. “How are you?” she said, then shook her head at the question. “Scratch that. Ignore me.”

“I'll manage. You?”

She nodded too enthusiastically to be the truth.

Smiles was starving, and he thought for a second about asking her to the kabob place. She might misinterpret that, though, and the truth was that his heart was in a strange place—stolen by a girl who'd taken $7 million with it.

“My dad wants your dad to come back and see him. Like, tonight. It doesn't matter how late, he said. Mind asking him for me?”

“Yeah, sure,” Melanie said as she stood. “Is he going to be okay for the IPO tomorrow?”

Smiles shrugged. “So listen,” he said, “probably not the greatest timing known to man, but could we talk about us for a second?”

“Yeah, uh, if that's what you want.”

Shanti shuffled some papers at the desk, stuffing things in folders and wrapping up for the night. “Let's walk,” Smiles said, and they waved good-bye to her on the way out.

They weren't alone again until they got to the skywalk. Night had fallen while he was in with his dad, and the hospital campus was a landscape of grays through the skywalk windows. “So after that night, you know, my birthday. Things got crazy, but I wanted to talk to you. Because you're really important to—”

“Hey, Smiles?” Melanie had stopped in the middle of the skywalk. “Would you mind if I said something first?”

“Uh, no—go ahead.” He returned to her, watched her stare out at a crane glowing with yellow lights.

“I can't even imagine what you've been through, okay? I was dealing with some stuff this weekend, too, though.” Her eyes followed the sway of the crane. “And it's just . . . I've always defined myself in relation to other people. I'm your girlfriend, you know? Or my dad's daughter. Or somebody's student. Even in my own head. It's really stupid.”

“You're not stupid, Mel. That's the last thing you are.”

“Yeah, well, I guess it's time for me to be me. Whatever that is.”

He saw, then, what she was trying to say.

“I get it,” he said. “I never really deserved you, Mel.”

She shook her head. “We just came to an end.”

“You know,” Smiles said, “you're much better at these breakups the second time around.”

Her laugh soothed him.

“I think you're going to like being Melanie Hunt,” he said.

“She's okay?”

“She's super cool,” Smiles said, and they walked together to the Infiniti.

Smiles got takeout from the kabob place, then let an action movie roll across his eyes just so he could stop thinking about everything for a minute. It didn't really work—he turned it off before the all-female special ops force even made it into the North Korean nuclear power plant. He had camped out on his sofa, where he used to crash three or four times a week. But his favorite spot no longer felt like home.

The ghost of Erin whispered in his ear. He went out to the all-night drugstore, then spent a good hour using the cleaning products all around the place, vacuuming and scrubbing and washing the glass of his aquariums clear. After the carpet cleaner set into the rug for half an hour, Lake Jägermeister came up without a hitch. By the time he'd put the second load of laundry in downstairs, the place was spotless and bright, looking three times larger without his junk strewn across the floor.

He stowed the cleaning products under the kitchen sink. “There,” he said, not sure who he'd done it for, but proud all the same. He was going to have to leave this place soon, unless he found a job that paid the rent. And Erin wasn't walking through that door, either. Did he want her to? Did he even know her? Nothing in his life was real except a clean carpet and a sudden urge to get back to his dad.

He grabbed his duffel bag from his newly organized closet and threw some overnight stuff inside. Smiles didn't know how much more time he had left with his dad, and tomorrow was going to be a big day.

“The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy. Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination.”

—Thomas Hill

TUESDAY

“Revenge is profitable.”

—Edward Gibbon,

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

263

“THEY JUST LEFT,”
Shanti said.

It was after midnight now, but she was still at the hospital. Her purse still hung across her shoulder like it had hours ago, when she'd been getting ready to leave the first time. A team of businessmen had shown up on her way out, she said. They had come to see his dad.

“I didn't feel right leaving him,” Shanti said. “Not tonight.”

“Thank you.” Smiles assumed that Mr. Hunt was one of the visitors, but didn't know why he would have brought a whole team with him. “Any idea what it was about?”

Shanti yawned and shook her head.

“Well, I guess I didn't feel right leaving, either. Okay if I spend the night in there?”

“Sure, honey. Blankets in that little closet.” She fished her keys out of her purse, gave him a hug, and flashed a sad smile on her way out.

Smiles walked the darkened hallway to his dad's room, stopping for a moment at the open door. The beeping machines throughout the floor sounded like a twisted version of a summer night. Smiles cleaned off the whiteboard with his shirt, then wrote as perfectly as he could:
Robert Smylie
. He leaned against the doorjamb and looked on for a minute, his dad's small body lying peacefully under the sheets.

People do their best
, his dad had said after he'd signed the document.
They do their best and they make terrible mistakes
. Smiles had thought he'd been talking about his mother, but he was talking about himself.

Smiles turned the Mozart album on low and found a paper-thin blanket in the small supply closet in his dad's room. He sunk into the chair in the corner, stretching his legs out on the wobbly ottoman and pulling the blanket up to his shoulders. The light from the hallway glinted off the metal clasps on the video production boxes. Above them, he could just make out the dark architecture of the lights and monitors assembled for the big show.

The thought of his dad performing tomorrow—touting his company to the world, the one built on a lie—made Smiles uneasy. But something told him, as his eyes fell shut for the night, that his father would never get the chance.

They wheeled his body away at five o'clock in the morning, the nurses moving in a somber ballet about the room. Smiles woke just as an overnight nurse he didn't know was taking his dad's pulse, finding him gone. She gave him a moment at the bedside, and then the quiet rush of activity began—his dad being untethered from his hospital bed, calls being made, men in scrubs whisking the body downstairs until it was released to the funeral home, they said. At some point, Smiles signed a form that was thrust in front of him.

He wished Shanti had been there. He wished Erin had been there. He stayed in the room because no one asked him to leave, and because he could still feel his dad's presence. Morning hadn't broken yet. Smiles returned to the chair and pulled the blanket over himself. Looking around the room, it occurred to him that he would have to bring his dad's things home with him—the picture of his mom and the iPod with all his favorite music on it. It was then that he noticed that the music had been shut off, and it was then that he began to cry.

Mr. Hunt found him shortly after six in the morning. Smiles was still cemented in the chair, wide awake but reluctant to move, when he saw Mr. Hunt pass quickly down the hallway, his head swiveling about. His shoes squeaked on the tile, and then a second later Mr. Hunt popped back into the door and said, “There you are.”

He spoke it loudly, out of breath from his search, and then he seemed to remember himself and settled himself in the doorway. He walked gingerly over to Smiles and knelt before the chair. “Smiles, I'm so sorry. I just heard.”

Smiles nodded. He didn't hold anything against Mr. Hunt. “Thank you.”

“It's good that you were here,” he said, an empty sentiment spoken to fill the air. Mr. Hunt stayed put at Smiles's side. He coughed and drew his hand over his mouth, and Smiles realized he was about to hear why Mr. Hunt had really come to the hospital.

“Smiles, umm, I know that you have only one thing on your mind right now, and if I had a choice I would leave you alone in your grief. But the fact is, we've been rather frantically looking for you since we heard about your father.”

“We?”

“The people who work with me in Alyce's legal department. You see, something happened last night—something unexpected. I suppose, perhaps, your father knew his time was coming.”

“He called you over here. Why?”

“Yes, that's right, he called us over here.” Mr. Hunt stopped and cleared his throat. “And Smiles, he made you the beneficiary of his entire interest in Alyce Systems.”

Smiles drew the blanket down from his chest. “He what? What does that mean?”

“Well, it . . .” Mr. Hunt stopped at a sound from the entrance to the room. Four people had appeared there—a man and a woman who looked like lawyers, and two older guys wearing shirts with the logo of the video production company. “A moment, please.” Mr. Hunt shooed them with a hand, and they scurried into the hall.

“Smiles, you now own about twenty-five percent of Alyce Systems. But there's something more important. As you know, your dad liked to make decisions himself. So Alyce mostly issued non-voting stock, which gives people a share of the company but no control over it. Your father managed to keep fifty-one percent of the voting stock for himself. The bottom line is, as of this moment, you control Alyce Systems yourself.”

Smiles heard a laugh come from his mouth.

“Now, I hate to ask you this, but decisions have to be made about this morning. The market opens in only a few hours, and we're scheduled to open trading in Alyce at ten o'clock on the New York Stock Exchange. We have to say something to our employees and investors. That's why those people are here, to get ready for the broadcast.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder.

“I think the easiest thing, Smiles, is to go ahead as planned. You can simply designate someone from the company to speak to the employees. I'd be happy to do it myself.”

Mr. Hunt waited. Smiles remembered how he had waited for Ben to give the go-ahead at Fox Creek. He had the distinct impression that Mr. Hunt wanted him to sign off on the suggestion just as much. A line of sweat trailed down the side of his face. Smiles fought a reflex to agree—to slide into the easiest groove life offered. He had a responsibility to someone—if only himself—to take this seriously. And now, with much more than his $7 million at stake, the last thing he'd be was an easy mark.

But why shouldn't he go along with it?

If he put it all on autopilot, he'd be the owner of Alyce Systems—a dream come to life. You didn't give up the thing you always wanted. You didn't give up the trust of your father—the trust that, when it finally came, felt like the greatest gift of all.

“Don't do anything yet,” he said to Mr. Hunt. “I need to talk to somebody first.”