Read Online The Cipher by John C. Ford - Free Book Online Page B

I’m not gonna lie, when I saw him out there in that game against Country Day . . .”
    Melanie wished that she could just drive in with her dad, but he left early and stayed late. He’d been walking out this morning, carrying a heavy briefcase and eating a bagel (both of which, like everything else her father did, made her fear an imminent heart attack), when Melanie had impulsively asked him if he knew anyone at Alyce Systems named Andrei.
    Her father stopped at the door. “Tarasov?”
    Melanie went with it. “Yeah, Andrei Tarasov.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Instantly, Melanie realized what a bad idea this was. No way could she tell him about snooping in Rose’s email account. Now she had to make something up on the spot, right there at seven o’clock in the morning, and she was a horrid liar to begin with.
    â€œUh, yeah, I guess. I think he’s a programmer?” Melanie spat out the line just to say something; a lot of Alyce’s employees had something to do with programming, one way or another. “I saw his name on something last week and didn’t recognize it.”
    That last part was actually a pretty smooth recovery. Melanie’s first project in HR had been some make-work assignment entering the programmers’ and analysts’ information (hire date, etc.) on a spreadsheet. Melanie probably
would
have remembered the name from that whole day of tweaking the spreadsheet just so.
    Her dad chewed down his bagel, while Melanie mourned every last carb he was ingesting. “What did you see his name on?”
    â€œUmm . . . something from Framingham, I think. From payroll.” A lot of programmers worked in the Framingham complex, where they also had a payroll office. Whatever. This was disaster territory now. Melanie, who had never been inside a church in her life, had rarely felt so sinful. “I was just wondering . . .” she said, trailing off lamely.
    â€œI doubt it would have come from payroll. He left a long time ago. Don’t remember him that well.”
    â€œOh, okay, thanks, Dad,” Melanie said, relieved when he kissed her cheek and stepped out the door. He waved good-bye to her from the path, his bagel swinging high in the morning air.
    The train rattled to a stop at Park Street.
    â€œThis is us,” Jenna said, perky as ever, oblivious to the fact that Melanie had spent the entire subway ride zoned out on thoughts of some guy named Andrei. They climbed the dusty, traffic-worn stairs of the T and ducked into an Au Bon Pain so Jenna could get her latte fix—“. . . since when would I want to be a cheerleader? It’s like, yeah, having Greg Simmons palm my ass ten feet in the air for a whole football game isn’t exactly my idea of . . .”—and made the thankfully short walk to the Alyce Systems headquarters.
    Melanie didn’t have much actual work to do, and most days she savored the light pulse of energy from the business-people gathering at the elevators, milling around the coffee station, settling into life on the thirty-fourth floor. A hush blanketed everything. Even the copy machines, which would spend the next eight hours hammering out documents, hummed a calming white noise throughout the floor.
    Best of all was the window by her cubicle. You could look down and sense the order to life: the rhythm of the traffic, the march of the waves.
    Melanie didn’t stop long at the window today. She logged in and went to Google right away. “Andrei Tarasov,” she entered, remembering the last name her dad had mentioned. Just four hits came up, three of them irrelevant. The other one, the first on the list, was a fifteen-year-old article from the
Boston Globe
’s Metro section.
    The headline ran: SOFTWARE TECH FOU ND DEAD AT WESTON RE SIDENCE.
    It took Melanie all of twenty seconds to read the article that took her breath away:
    W ESTON —Police discovered