Case of Lies

Nina said slowly, “You know, Dave, I never really knew what evil was until I met you. I could find some excuse for every one of my guilty clients. But you taught me. Now I know.”

“But-”

“Evil is a man who kills his wife and thinks he deserves pity. You make me sick. Listen. Remember this one thing from our conversation.”

“Wait-”

“Remember this through all the years to come, Dave. It was your fault. All of it.” She spat the words out.

“Don’t do this!” He was shouting again. He kept it up while the guard came in and dragged him back into the secure area. Nina sat, her head bowed, until the guard came to fetch her.

Epilogue

THE PRE-CHRISTMAS SNOWSTORM TURNED INTO A whopper. Three feet of snow plumped up the street with mounds of marshmallows. Four feet packed the higher ski resorts. When bright, dry conditions returned, Tahoe went wild. Tourist SUVs clogged the roads in and out, ski racks piled high on their roofs. The Heavenly Gondola sagged with the weight of the people going up and down from the lodge. The lake that never froze, rimmed by its white peaks, gleamed under a cloudless, deep sky. The casinos rocked into the night and Christmas carols jingled across the mountains.

Nina Reilly’s law offices closed, leaving behind a Happy Holidays sign to swing on the door, reminding unobservant clients that the world had shut down. For this short time, all the ru

On Vashon Island in Washington State, at his scratched old desk, Elliott Wakefield set down his mechanical pencil and cocked his head at the result. He had checked the equations over and over, and the results never varied. He couldn’t find an error. Starting with any integer on Gauss’s li line, he could first determine precisely how many primes there were up to that point, and then generate the nearest prime by plugging that number into his function. Factoring any-size composite number followed as a necessary corollary of the function.

He had finished his proof, twenty-three pages of closely reasoned math and physics condensed down from two hundred pages.

He got up and wandered around his room, looking at the books, picking up the loose papers on the floor, leaving his notebook displayed on the center of his desk like a black square-cut diamond.

Now what? Ask some colleagues to read it before daring to submit it to a journal? He really should.

He had wanted Silke to read and appreciate it. Now he wasn’t sure what he wanted from it.

“El?” his father called up from the foot of the stairs. “Di

“Two minutes,” he answered.

The Net was open to one of the XYC bank-account sites inside Bank of America. XYC was cheating with several other Cayman accounts, which Elliott had recently also accessed, but there was still plenty in the B of A checking account he was looking at.

He transferred $1,739,197 to his proxy account. Always a reasonable amount.

Always a prime number.

But that would be theft. He transferred the money back. Aw, I’m only playin’ witcha, he thought.

For fun, he punched in the primary URL for Russia’s military accounts. The Russians, too, were being bad boys. For now, he was just enjoying himself, educating himself on how the world really runs.

You know, El, the fame and immortality thing can wait a while, he thought, begi

“El?”

… you have changed. Learned a lot.

He twisted back and forth in the chair, thinking.

The money thing wasn’t important either, not really.

But the revenge thing-the revenge thing was important. XYC should have stopped Flint. There would never be another Silke on this earth, and not only were people dead, but he, Elliott Wakefield, would never love another woman.

He thought for another moment, then went to his E-mail server and typed in messages to Professor Braun and to Branson, the lawyer.

To the professor, he wrote:

Forming new company using unbreakable encryption formula. Would like to have you on board. Interested? Will double your fee.

To Branson, he wrote:

Are you available to serve as my counsel on a start-up here in Seattle? My encryption formula is unbreakable. I’ll need some patent work.

He thought, I’ll ask Nina to handle some of the lawsuits. He sent the E-mails and leaned back. Did he want to ca

No. Leave the phonies. Keep the competent hard-asses and hit XYC where it would hurt. They thought he was a naive fool. They would find out what it means to take on a mathematician.

Numbers, quanta; they’re shifty. Yesterday’s off-ramp is today’s cinder-block wall. Sometimes the cosmos does seem to dissolve and re-form with certain subtle differences. He should know. It had happened to him. He had hardened, grown up.

“El!”

“Coming.” He shut down and walked downstairs. Pop couldn’t get to the second floor anymore, so his research could remain private, if he wanted. As for the NSA searchers, they could come back, but they would never find out how he accessed his sites and he’d just slip the notebook under Pop’s behind again. Nobody would pull Pop out of his wheelchair to search.

His father shook the old snow dome of Santa in his sleigh and placed it in the middle of the kitchen table. White flakes landed on Santa’s shoulders, then drifted down to the ground. “Merry Christmas Eve,” he said, holding his glass of wine high, admiring the candlelight glowing through the red.

“I have news,” Elliott said.

“Oh?”

“It’s finished. You know what I mean?”

His father’s glass stopped and hovered in the air.

“I can’t find an error.”

“You really finished?” his father asked. “All that work came to something, eh? All that concentration.” His voice quivered slightly.

“It took a long time. I doubted myself, Pop. I told everyone I could, but I didn’t believe it.”

“I always said, you’re a bright one.”

“Merry Christmas, Pop.” They clinked glasses and drank. His father had grilled steaks. Elliott poured on the A1 sauce.

“I read a good article in the International Journal of American Linguistics today,” his father said. “I might write up a little note on it and submit it.”

“I’ll input it for you,” Elliott said. He took a big bite, savoring the flavors. Nobody could grill a steak like Pop.

Outside the cabin windows, last whispers of the old year’s snow murmured around the trees of the Tahoe basin. Inside, the Christmas tree cast its blurred colors across the shadowy ceiling. Presents lay under the tree. Unable to keep his eyes open, Bob had gone to bed after midnight, just after Christmas Day arrived. Hitchcock lay at Nina’s feet on the couch, paws crossed, eyes fluttering as he dreamed.

Sitting in the armchair nearest the fire, Kurt relaxed, wearing the same sweater and jeans he had worn when she picked him and Bob up at the airport. His boots were propped by the front door, his suitcases and backpack next to them. They had all eaten out and talked about the trip and the Ha

Now a silence dropped between them. Nina could hear the big fir bending in the dark front yard, the heat turning on, the wood spitting and crackling in the grate. She got up and went over to Kurt, sitting down at his feet, her back to him, watching the fire. She stretched.