Chapter 8
Jill’s first dance was with Terry Reese who, in the larger scheme of things, wasn’t that important.
The Network had classified the students of Thorndike’s senior class by the estimated wealth of their families. In that classification, Terry Reese ended up in the bottom tier, the families whose net worth was measured in ten million dollar increments. Terry’s father, an investment banker, was worth twenty million at the most, making him wealthy enough to hang with the uber-rich, but below the poverty line at Thorndike.
Sitting in that bottom tier with Terry were about twenty other non-players, people who got the invite to Thorndike because their families were legacy graduates, or because the admissions committee saw potential in the kids even if the parents weren’t terribly rich.
The next tier up was the hundred millionaires, where the children of politicians and corporate bigwigs resided. This tier included all the people who served as Kim Renwick’s lackeys, like Pauline Wabash, Rosalyn Smith, Andrea Peterson, and Brian Kingsbury. It also included most of the people the Network had identified as possible targets for Jill and Nicky’s subterfuge. Vince Weir, Mattie Dupree, Jenny Young, Lonnie Best, Sam Featherstone, and most importantly, Annika Fleming—these were people whose net worth was large enough to be relevant, but not so large that the Renwicks were all over them.
The tier above them belonged to the billionaires. This was a smaller tier, and the one in which Jill’s family resided. Thorndike ensured that no child of a billionaire was left behind, but even still, there were only so many billionaires in the world, and this tier was always an exclusive club. Occupying this space with Jill were Mary Torrance, Montgomery Oppenheimer, Veronica Gregg, and Richard Nguyen. In this tier, you were either committed to a Coronation candidate or you were one. Veronica and Richard were supporters of Kim. Mary had her own candidacy. Montgomery came from a family that owed the Renwicks a favor.
And then there was Jill.
Kim Renwick had taken Jill’s support as a given until tonight. Jill’s father had lunch with Galen Renwick from time to time, and Jill’s family was the sort that didn’t make waves. The little lie Jill had told her friends about her parents being part of a consortium that supported Nicky Bloom was certain to cause major waves in DC by tomorrow.
If you blab, I’ll deny everything I’ve just told you.
That line from Jill’s story about the consortium was crucial, and served as fair warning to her friends. Even as she admonished them all not to say a word, she was counting on at least a couple of them spilling their guts before the night was over. There was simply too much excitement and too much wine for people like Mattie Dupree and Jenny Young to keep quiet.
And by tomorrow, when all of Washington was abuzz about Nicky Bloom and the “secret consortium” behind her entry, a consortium whose only known members were the Wentworths, Jill would have to deal with the fallout. She’d have to deny she ever said anything about a secret consortium, even as she insisted with Annika and the rest that the consortium was real. She’d have to tell her father that she never said a word, that someone was playing with them. She might even have to speak with the Renwicks.
It was about to get very interesting.
She and Terry made the turn on the far wall as they rounded the dance floor. She was glad that Terry didn’t want to talk. She had a lot to work through in her mind. Just thinking about the can of worms she had opened was making her shiver, and she had to remind herself that this was what she wanted. Adventure, intrigue, and the knowledge that she was fighting the good fight.
When Jill enrolled at Thorndike as a new freshman, she knew that something wasn’t right with the world, and that her parents might be a part of it, but she never imagined that two short years later she would be an agent of the Network, actively working to overthrow the established order.
The Wentworth family fortune started in the 19th century in the tobacco business, and then exploded in the 20th when Jill’s great, great grandfather bought a ranch in Western Virginia that was dripping in oil.
By the time Jill’s father was of age to receive his inheritance, the fortune was large enough that no one in the family had to work. But Jill’s father, Walter, worked anyway. He started a software company, and asked his new wife to be the first employee.
His new wife, Carolyn, was only nineteen when they met and got married, twenty when she started writing computer code for her husband’s company, and twenty-one when she became pregnant with Jill.
The Wentworth family company was called Black Dart Enterprises. It provided “classified software and security solutions.” It sold a single product: a software suite called Clean Street. It had a single customer: the United States government. It made Walter Wentworth a billionaire, and it bought Walter Wentworth a close friendship with Daciana Samarin, the most powerful immortal on earth.
Rich, well-mannered, talented, useful: this was how the immortals viewed the Wentworths. Carolyn Wentworth was widely viewed as the most talented programmer in the world, and her Clean Street software allowed the immortals to stay ahead of their enemies. Clean Street had become ubiquitous, its code freely flowing throughout the entire digital realm. The software read every word that was written on the Internet. It listened to every phone call. It was embedded in satellite signals, bank transactions, text messages—it was in the full-body scanners at the airport and the x-ray machines at customs. It connected together all the many surveillance devices the government put in offices and homes, it made sense of millions of hours of conversation, and reported it all to the government. Clean Street identified enemies of the state so they could be found and removed. It was Walter’s favorite child, and Carolyn’s obsession.
Their daughter Jill was just an afterthought.
Her mother obsessed with work, her father obsessed with being fabulous, Jill grew up not really knowing either of her parents. Not that she didn’t try, especially with her mother. When she was little, Jill sat in the second story office of their mansion in Brandywine, Virginia while her mother worked. She wasn’t allowed to talk, but she stayed in the room anyway, listening to her mother’s fingers clatter on the keyboard. She drew pictures while her mother typed. She looked out the window while her mother thought.
An old growth forest surrounded the Wentworth family mansion. From inside her mother’s office, little Jill used to gaze into that forest, looking for activity, taking particular interest in a family of hawks that lived in a nearby tree.
On some afternoons, the hawks would glide above and around the house for hours, waiting for prey to show up on the ground below and swooping to the earth in breathtaking displays of strength and speed. Jill imagined that the rabbits and field mice in the surrounding forest were actually little gremlins trying to attack the Wentworth mansion, and the hawks were their only protection. She came to think of the hawks as her pets, even though she never stood within ten feet of one.
Noticing that Jill had lots to say about the birds in the forest, the nanny bought Jill a pair of binoculars and a field guide, tools that allowed Jill to identify the majestic birds as Northern Harriers, also known as Marsh Hawks.
With binoculars and field guide in hand, Jill spent spring and summer outdoors, tracking those hawks. She went on daily expeditions to find them. She learned to distinguish the males, whose feathers were white on the underside, from the females, who were totally brown. She gave names to every hawk she saw, and learned the distinct markings and behavior of each one. She even found a nest with five eggs under one of the bushes that served to mark the southern edge of the Wentworth property.
When Jill was nine, her father hosted the software buyers from the Pentagon at the house for a weekend retreat of sorts. One of the men wore a hairpiece that was obvious even to Jill’s inexperienced eye. At the end of the weekend, Jill’s father took his guests for a walk in the woods and one of the hawks decided it wanted the man’s hairpiece. Maybe it thought the hairpiece was a rodent, or it would go
nice in the nest. Whatever the reason, the hawk swooped low, took the hairpiece away, and left a gash on the man’s scalp.
The following day, Jill’s dad hired a specialist to come and drive all the hawks away and place special netting on every tree to ensure they never returned.
Jill never forgave her dad for removing the hawks, but she did move on. Her forest friends removed, Jill’s fascination with nature eventually gave way to a genetically inevitable fascination with computers. Her mother had written Clean Street, after all.
Strangely, it was at age 10, itself a combination of one and zero, that Jill’s brain seemed to open up to a natural understanding of binary logic. Nested command structures, object-oriented analysis, compilation, execution – Jill began to see the world as inputs, algorithms, and outputs. At age eleven, she coded a video game from scratch. At age twelve, she hacked into her school’s mainframe, and fiddled with her grades and attendance records.
When she was fourteen, and a freshman at Thorndike, Jill briefly stepped away from the keyboard to indulge an interest in Ryan Jenson, but that didn’t go very well, and she went back to her computer.
At age fifteen Jill found herself disillusioned, lonely, and bored, so she wrote a program that intercepted the cell phone data of her classmates, streaming their phone calls and text messages onto the computer screen in her bedroom. For one dreary, depressing night, she eavesdropped on all the personal conversations of her classmates. She didn’t like what she saw. Backstabbing, lying, nastiness, a total lack of authenticity – her peers at Thorndike reminded Jill of her father, and sent her looking for something different. Something that wasn’t totally fake. Careful to hide her virtual tracks, Jill began wandering the dark alleys of the Internet, making contact with people who gave her passwords to the encrypted message boards and chat rooms where forbidden topics were discussed.
She found herself reading posts from people who named themselves Bloodsucker Nightmare and VanHelsingXX, people who spoke openly about their hatred for the immortals, and their longing for a revolution. At first, the posts shocked her, sometimes to the point of turning off the computer and swearing she would never go back to those forbidden sites again.
But she couldn’t stay away. It was the truth of it all, the war between good and evil that was playing out in the world, and the fact that Jill and her family were on the wrong side – it made her come back. When she went to the chat rooms, Jill was doing right by the world, atoning for the sin of being a Wentworth, if only for a few minutes. She knew she was risking her life every time she logged on, but was confident in her own ability to remain hidden from the many spiders and bots looking for troublemakers like her.
Jill observed as people traded information on suspected locations of the farms where slaves were grown, and read the desperate pleas for help from people whose loved ones were stolen away in the night. She read about the Network, the secret organization whose goal was to overthrow the immortals, and fantasized about being a part of it. She adopted her own handle in this secret world, coming to be known as Marsh Hawk.
Marsh Hawk quickly earned a reputation as someone in the know. Her stolen data stream at Thorndike was useful for getting more than just school gossip. Thorndike students were the children of politicians, lobbyists, and corporate titans. Paying close attention and reading between the lines, Jill used the stolen text messages and phone calls to infer whose stock was rising on Capitol Hill and whose was falling, who was slipping the goods to which politicians and who was about to get squashed. The virtual gossip at Thorndike, so boring and disheartening to Jill at first, turned out to be more informative than any news service or web site. She came to understand the importance of information, of “intel” as they called it in the chat rooms, and Jill was happy to have something to contribute to the cause, however small.
While she fantasized about being one of those Network agents who went undercover to get close to the immortals, who stormed the mansions to take on the vampires and free the slaves, Jill never actually imagined herself being anything more than a snoop at her school. All that changed the winter of Jill’s junior year, when her mom was late on the “deliverables” for version 2.0 of Clean Street. Walter had promised a new, improved version of the software to the immortals, but Jill’s mom was having trouble pulling it together. As the deadline neared, Walter became increasingly belligerent toward his wife. Carolyn took to eating and sleeping at her desk, working eighteen to twenty hours a day. Walter started staying home from the office, pacing the rosewood floors of the living room all day, drinking wine straight from the bottle.
On a Sunday night in December, the deadline for Clean Street 2.0 only twenty-four hours away, Jill’s father burst into her bedroom in the middle of the night, reeking of alcohol, a crazed look in her eyes.
“You have to help her,” he said. “You’re good with computers. You could do it.”
Jill sat up.
“I don’t know how to help her, Dad,” she said. “She’s been working on that software for years. It would take me all night just to read the code.”
“Jill, we are going to miss our deadline and the shit is going to hit the fan!” Walter shouted. “Do you know how many hotshot young startups want this contract? Do you know how quick the immortals would cast us aside if they thought there was someone better out there than your mother? Do you know what will happen to us when that day comes? The minute your mother and I stop being useful to Daciana, we become a problem for her because we know too much. We cannot miss this deadline.”
“Well you should have thought about that before you got us all into this mess,” Jill said. “Mom’s been working by herself for all these years. You should have hired some help for her while there was still time.”
“We can’t hire help, Jill. The immortals don’t want a bunch of people knowing how Clean Street works. Every person who has access to the source code is a person who can help the rebels beat it. That’s why we got the contract in the first place. One person. Your mother. One loyal, dedicated, talented person, who gets it right every time. That’s who your mother is. They must not know that she is struggling. We have to give Daciana a working piece of software by Tuesday, and it has to look like your mother did it alone.”
Jill sat for a moment, pondering those words.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She found her mother crashed out on the couch in front of her computer, snoring. The poor woman had been pushed farther than her body could go.
On the screen was Clean Street 2.0, in all its glory. Jill sat down, her father’s voice ringing in her ears. Every person who has access to the source code is a person who can help the rebels beat it.
Looking at the code, Jill felt a kinship to her mother for the first time ever. This woman, who had been so distant from Jill for so long, who had left her daughter to be raised by hired help, who ignored that little girl who used to sit in her office, gazing at the hawks outside—this woman was an amazing programmer. Reading the lines of code, watching how the command structure came together, Jill felt like she wasn’t looking at a piece of software, but at a work of art.
All night long Jill looked at the code. She printed it out and made notes on the paper. She used her mother’s white board to draw diagrams of what the routines were trying to accomplish. And as she came to understand the nature of the problem, the reason why version 2.0 wasn’t finished, she felt like she and her mother were communicating. She felt like her mother had come to her for advice, and she was able to offer it.
The problem was with the way the software taught itself to learn and grow. Jill’s mother had written routines in the program that helped it understand when hackers were trying to beat it, and taught it to learn and grow on its own based on what the hackers were trying to do. Hackers were human, and Clean Street was not, but Carolyn Wentworth had written the software to learn the way a human does, and it simply wasn’t able.
It turned out to be an easy fix.
Jill simplified the learning algorithms, so rather than trying to comprehend what humans were up to, the software simply observed and reacted, the success or failure of those reactions informing the software’s next steps, making it learn. By sunrise, Jill had completed Clean Street 2.0.
But in the completed version, hidden deep inside the code, was a loophole. It was a loophole Jill put there to spite her father, who had taken Carolyn Wentworth’s miraculous mind and aimed it at the most hideous outcome imaginable. Here was a woman whose brilliance could be changing the world for the better. Instead, because of Walter, Carolyn’s genius belonged to the immortals.
The loophole was named The Marsh Hawk Protocol. Whenever Clean Street 2.0 encountered a certain encryption signature, the same signature Jill had been using all this time to hide her own tracks on the Internet, the loophole kicked in. The loophole would allow Jill, and anyone else who knew the encryption, to roam free in the digital universe, with Clean Street purposely looking the other way. It would allow the Network to hide from the software specifically designed to find them.
Jill went to the couch and kissed her sleeping mother on the cheek.
“It’s done, Mom,” she said. “Your program works now.”
Then she went to the laptop in her bedroom, got into the chatroom, and asked if anyone there could point her to an operative from the Network.
Six months later she was sitting in the safe house with Gia Rossi and Nicky Bloom. Shannon’s tragic death in a boating accident had opened a spot in the school, and Jill’s ability to break into the admissions database had given the Network an in. With Jill’s help, the Network created a fictional teenager who was exactly what Thorndike was looking for. They gave this teenager so many advantages over her peers she was sure to get the invite for the open spot.
“And once you’re in,” Jill said to Nicky, “we’ll have to work quickly to get people excited about you.”
“Nicky’s goal will be to get into the popular cliques right away,” said Gia.
“No,” said Jill. “That’s exactly what we don’t want her to do. Nicky must be bland to the point of invisible until the night of Homecoming. Anything more might put her on the radar of the Renwicks, and if they start attacking her before Homecoming they’ll ruin everything. I will lay the groundwork for Nicky. I am working on Annika Fleming as we speak.”
“Annika Fleming?” Gia asked with skepticism. “The governor’s daughter?”
“Yes, the governor of Oklahoma is her father, and she isn’t one of the richest kids in school,” said Jill. “But she will be the one to bring a big crowd to the after party. With Annika, if you get her, you get a bunch of other people too. Mattie, Jenny, Jake, Vince – probably ten more – Annika has this whole crew of people who follow her wherever she goes, and I don’t think she likes Kim Renwick at all.”
“That all sounds great, Jill,” said Nicky. “But there must be something I can do before Homecoming.”
“There is,” said Jill. “We need a big money donor, someone with potential to swing the whole contest. Even with me, Annika, and her group, you won’t be able to beat Kim if she has all the wealthiest families. We need to hook a big fish. And I know just the one to approach. I’d do it myself, but he and I have a history. It would be better if he was talking to you.”
A history. He and I have a history. Get off it, Jill. What you and Ryan had was hardly enough to call a history.
In the wealth classification of the Thorndike senior class, there was one more tier even above billionaires like Jill. Two families, and two families only, occupied this tier. These families were more than normal billionaires. They were billionaires whose wealth was so astronomical they had the potential to swing the entire Coronation contest by themselves. In a world of the super rich, these were the top 1 per cent.
One of these rich upon rich kids was Art Tremblay, who was so firmly in the Renwick camp the Network hadn’t even considered him. Even now, as the Viennese Waltz was nearing its finale, Art was glaring at Nicky. He had been watching her the entire dance, and he had a shifty, nervous look in his eyes.
The other member of the top tier was Ryan Jenson, the beautiful loner of the senior class, the one and only boy with whom Jill had been more than friends. She and Ryan never talked anymore, but she knew enough from their time together to know how he would respond when Nicky arrived in a black dress. Ryan had no love at all for Kim Renwick.
If Nicky was to have any chance of winning, she needed Ryan’s support.
Now, as the Viennese Waltz hit its final bars, and it was time for a partner change, Jill watched as Nicky stepped right into the perfect spot. Ryan had no choice but to dance with her.
Jill shook her head, amazed at how good Nicky was.
“Are you rejecting me?”
“What’s that?” Jill said.
She was standing in front of Brian Kingsbury, a six-foot behemoth, who apparently wanted to be her next dance partner.
“You were shaking your head,” Brian said.
“Oh…no. Sorry. Of course I want to dance with you. I was just thinking about something.”
“Something interesting?” Brian asked.
Jill stepped forward and let Brian take her hand.
“I was thinking about Kim,” Jill said, “and how happy I am that she’s not such a sure thing anymore.”