Chapter 29
Jill watched as Nicky and Annika sat at the bar, talking. She couldn’t hear their conversation, but she could see that Annika was going through a full range of emotions. She recognized the way Annika was leaning in as she spoke, moving with slow, exaggerated movements. It was the same way she moved on the night they watched Crimson Sunrise at her house. It was the way she acted when she was drunk.
Nicky said something that agitated Annika. The way Annika responded, like a cornered dog, made Jill nervous. She didn’t know if she could go through with this.
Spying on her classmates, breaking into the school computer, pushing out a whisper campaign about Nicky Bloom and a secret consortium behind her – Jill had signed up for all of it, and, truth be told, had enjoyed doing it. But blackmail…blackmail was a completely different universe of activity. Blackmail was forcing someone to act against her own will. It was head-on conflict, and the thought of it terrified Jill.
What if it didn’t work? Jill imagined herself talking to Annika, and, in her mind, her own voice was weak.
I know about you and your secret boyfriend. If you don’t want anyone else to know, you’ll do as I say.
What if Annika sensed Jill’s weakness and fought back? It wasn’t like Annika was without options here. Jill needed her, badly, and Annika knew it. Without Annika and the crowd she brought, Nicky’s after-party was a bust. Was Jill in a position to dictate anything to her? All Jill had on Annika was some dirty laundry, obtained illegally. Jill had broken into Annika’s hotel room and put illegal software on her computer. If Annika refused to cooperate and Jill had to release the dirt, Annika could easily arrange to take Jill down with her.
It was all a giant bluff, and Annika was sure to see that. It was a big confidence game, like everything else in Washington, the sort of game at which Annika thrived and Jill stunk.
Nicky and Annika seemed to be past the worst of their confrontation now. They were speaking quietly to each other. Nicky was looking straight ahead. Annika was looking right at Nicky. In her drunken state, Annika probably didn’t know she was staring, her eyes affixed on Nicky’s face even as no words passed between them.
And now Nicky was getting up to leave. It was go-time for Jill. She needed to put aside all these doubts and just do it. She didn’t have any other options.
But Jill observed two things happen as Nicky took her exit.
The first was a touch, Nicky’s hand on Annika’s shoulder. It was a friendly gesture, mature and full of self-assurance, more like a teacher to a student than one student to another, and Annika responded in a big way. Annika leaned into Nicky’s touch, like a cat arching its back to meet its master’s hand. As Nicky let her hand slide away, Annika’s body followed along, extending the touch as long as possible.
The second was a stare from Annika, practically a gape. As Nicky walked away, Annika’s eyes followed her out, scanning from top to bottom to top again. She looked like a hungry lion gazing upon its prey.
Or just another dude who was checking Nicky out.
The part of Jill’s brain that had taken in the entirety of her mother’s Clean Street code and seen the error, the same part that could sift through thousands of lines of dialogue all around and hear the pertinent bit of gossip, the one sentence that had any meaning – it now saw all the disparate ends of her relationship with Annika, from the Annika she barely knew before this summer to the Annika who took her to Cozumel to the Annika who watched Crimson Sunrise to the Annika who had a secret lover in Brazil.
Not a secret boyfriend. A secret lover. A secret lover to whom Annika sent encoded messages where the other students at Thorndike were all characters from Crimson Sunrise.
Jill turned around and walked away from the bar. She went to the far wall and walked along the outer edge of the ballroom, going all the way to the front of the mansion where she asked the slaves to kindly open the door so she could step outside.
She ran to the far end of the driveway and banged on the back door of her limo. Her driver, a tall and plump fellow named Dante, popped the locks so she could get inside.
“Hello, Miss,” he said. “How was the dance?”
“It’s still going on,” Jill said. “I just had to come out here to think. I’ll need some privacy please.”
“Certainly,” said Dante. He pressed a button on his dashboard and a plastic screen rose up behind his head, giving Jill her own soundproof space.
Jill reached under her seat and pulled out her tablet computer, which she used to log onto her system at home. She pulled up the old surveillance files from freshman year, the text messages and phone calls she had intercepted from her classmates in a moment of boredom. All the data from that spying job was stored in a database that could be filtered by name and phone number. She of course had studied Annika’s data stream to the point of memorizing it.
Tonight she was interested in one text message Annika had received on November 14th, a Thursday.
I really enjoyed talking to you last night. My parents are going out of town this weekend. Come over tomorrow and watch a movie with me.
Annika’s response to that message, a benign acceptance of the offer, had never struck Jill as unusual or noteworthy. The text had come from Shannon Evans, who had been a member of Annika’s group since the beginning. So what if they had watched a movie together one weekend in freshmen year? The exchange was no different than a hundred others Annika had with every one of her friends.
It was what happened after that exchange that suddenly seemed significant to Jill, and that she now wanted to verify. Scrolling through the rest of the file, looking at every incoming and outgoing message from Annika’s phone until Jill had shut down the surveillance software, there was no other communication with Shannon. None at all. Annika texted people in her group every day, but not Shannon. And it wasn’t like they’d had some falling out or something. Far from it. From the beginning of freshman year right up until her untimely death, Shannon was a member of Annika’s clique in good standing. Jill had freshman algebra with both of them that year. Miss Metzler, fourth period – Jill remembered how Shannon and Annika always came in to class together, how they always sat in the same two desks in the back corner, how they giggled and carried on every day until Metzler screamed at them to shut it.
Jill flung that data out of the way and got into some different software, using her tablet to log into Annika’s laptop with the spyware she had installed in Cozumel. She got into Zhang Li’s secret email account and looked at the properties, pulling up the account creation date.
November 17th, freshman year, just three days after Annika’s final text message exchange with Shannon.
They had quit communicating by text because it wasn’t secure. Now they were using anonymous web mail accounts, named after the main characters in the movie they had watched at Shannon’s house that weekend, a movie about two teenagers whose secret love pits them against the rest of the world.
She pulled out her phone and made a secure call to Alvin Green from the Network.
“Jill, I’m surprised to hear from you. Is the dance over already?”
“Don’t worry about the dance right now,” Jill said. “I need you to do some research, and I need it right away. I could use an answer in the next minute or two.”
“What can I do for you, Jill?”
“I need you to hack into the motor vehicle division in Rio de Janeiro and use facial recognition software to find someone.”
“Wow. That’s a tall order for the next minute or two. That could take weeks.”
“Just find a point of entry and I’ll walk you through it.”
“Even finding a point of entry--”
“They have a web site,” Jill snapped. “Just get me the IP and DNS info and we’ll go from there.”
“Alright, alright, give me a second…”
Alvin needed more than a second, but Jill kept her cool. No use yelling at him now. She didn’t have remote access to the Network’s fa
cial recognition software or the databank of photos, so she was stuck with Alvin if she wanted to finish this.
“Okay, got it,” Alvin said.
“Look for all the threads leading out to adjacent servers,” Jill said. “Tell me what you see. All we need is one connection and I can get you in.”
Jill took Alvin on a quick tour of her best break-in techniques, using the Marsh Hawk Protocol to ride Clean Street’s access privileges right into the master database for the Detran in Rio de Janeiro, where all driver’s license photos were stored.
“Connect the facial recognition software and scan the database going back to the beginning of the summer,” Jill said.
“Whose face am I looking for?” said Alvin.
“Shannon Evans.”