The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (14 page)

“A logic bomb,” Jill said, shaking her head. “I should have seen it. I should have known they’d have something like this.”

“A logic bomb?”

“A final piece of security, one that I missed,” Jill said. “There was malicious code hidden in the data that got activated when we removed it from the server.”

“But I saw it!” Alvin said. “I saw it clear as crystal just a minute ago. Everything was exactly as it should be.”

“The code hadn’t been activated yet when you were looking,” said Jill. “It would be designed to do a check every few minutes. Some bit of communication direct with the hardware, maybe the system bus, or the processor. The data runs a check to make sure it’s physically stored on the TPM server. If it is, all is well. If it finds that it has been moved off the server, it self-destructs. When you were looking at the data after the transfer, it hadn’t run the check yet. Those few minutes between when it arrived to you and when it performed the automatic check were the only window we had to look at all of it. The data blew itself up.”

“Did it ever,” Alvin said.

Jill grew more and more disgusted with every file she opened. Emails that were supposed to be strings of text had transformed themselves into nonsense symbols. Scanned documents of blueprints and wiring diagrams had become jumbled jigsaw puzzles in a million mixed up pixels. More than a terabyte of stolen data, and she couldn’t read a single file. It was 100% corrupted.

“Now what?” Alvin said.

“Now we put it back together again,” said Jill.

As she ended the call with Alvin, she created a new file that she named, “All the King’s Horses,” and she got to work trying to figure out how to reconstruct this Humpty Dumpty of data.

Six hours later, the sun coming up outside and the data still a mess, Jill decided that school could wait ‘til tomorrow, and committed herself to a full day in front of her computer screen.

 
When the maid knocked on her door and asked her if she wanted breakfast, Jill shouted that she was sick and was not to be disturbed today. When her father, who was suddenly interested in Jill and her opinions, tried to come in and continue the conversation they started the night before, she told him to buzz off.

She covered the walls in dry-erase algorithms, attacking the problem from a hundred different angles. The key with a logic bomb was to find the exact path of its destruction so it could be reworked in reverse. In Jill’s mind, the broken pieces of data were two ends of a zipper, and her job was to write the program that could slide down the middle and pull it back together.

She was so deep in her work that she paid no mind to her phone, which buzzed all day long with incoming texts. She was oblivious to the passage of time, unaware of what her clock said or where the sun was in the sky. When the doorbell rang she didn’t hear it. When the maid invited a guest inside and said, “Jill’s upstairs in her bedroom,” she didn’t notice it. It was only when someone rapped hard on Jill’s door that she shook herself loose from her trance.

She turned in time to see Annika throw the door open and barge into the bedroom.

“W’oh, what is all this stuff?” Annika said, picking up a loose motherboard and turning it over in her hands.

“Oh, hey. What are you doing here?” Jill said as she raced to close all the programs she had open on her screen.

“Just coming to check on you,” Annika said. “You weren’t at school and you didn’t respond to any of my texts.”

Jill picked up her phone. She had texts from Nicky, Mattie, the attendance office at Thorndike, her father, and Annika.

“I’m sorry,” Jill said. “I haven’t been myself today. Looks like you really wanted to talk to me.”

“Of course I did,” Annika said. She closed the door to Jill’s bedroom, letting it latch shut quietly. “You and I haven’t spoken much since the party.”

Jill tried to shift her focus to Annika, but was having trouble. She had been so intent on her work that she had ignored all the signals from her body to take a rest. Now, as she pushed the programming work to the background, her body’s needs were making themselves known in a big way. She felt tired and weak.

“I didn’t mean to be so out of touch,” Jill said. “I’ve been--”

“You’ve been working on something,” said Annika. “I can tell. You look like you haven’t left this room in days. Was it related to…you know?”

“To Shannon?” Jill said.

Annika moved in closer, her face full of excitement at hearing her girlfriend’s name. As much as Jill wanted to get back to her data problem, it was clear that Annika wouldn’t leave her alone until she got some news on Shannon Evans.

“Come here, let me show you something,” Jill said.

She opened a new window on her computer, navigated deep into the file structure, and opened a program called
Clean Street Pings
.

“This is a program that tracks hits on the IP address Shannon’s been emailing you from,” Jill said.

“So this is what you’ve been doing all day,” Annika said in an approving tone.

“Yes,” Jill lied.

Clean Street Pings
was a program Jill wrote for the Network more than a year ago. But it was a good cover for what she had really been doing all day.

“Remember I told you that the immortals probably knew about Shannon already?” Jill said.

“Oh yes. It’s all I’ve been able to think about.”

“Well here is the actual evidence,” Jill said, pointing to some lines of text on the screen. “See those lines with the star next to them?”

“Yes, what is all this stuff? It looks like a list of dates.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” said Jill. “Dates and times when there was activity on Shannon’s IP address. Most of the activities are things Shannon initiated herself, like getting on her email or surfing the Net. But the ones with stars next to them came from outside. That’s where Clean Street went in and had a look at what Shannon was up to.”

“Clean Street?”

“It’s a piece of software my mom wrote for the immortals,” said Jill. “It’s what they use to spy on people.”

“Holy shit, Jill. Is that how you’re able to find out all this stuff? Because your mom wrote the software?”

“More or less,” said Jill. “But keep that to yourself if you please. I don’t have to tell you that what I’m doing right now would get us both killed if--”

“Yeah, yeah, I understand. Just tell me if Shannon is safe.”

“Well, when I look at this, I see good news and bad news.”

“Bad news first,” Annika said.

“The bad news is that the data pings on Shannon’s IP were all initiated at the administrator level.”

“In English, please.”

“Daciana took a personal interest in Shannon and her family. She’s not having an underling do the spying. She’s doing it herself. Or maybe I should say, she was.”

“She was?”

“That’s the good news,” Jill said. “The data pings were happening daily all summer long, but then they just stopped. Neither Daciana nor anyone else has had a look at Shannon’s data feed since July.”

“What does that mean?” Annika asked.

“I don’t know. It’s curious, isn’t it?”

“Are you sure they’ve stopped looking? Maybe they’re doing it in a different way now, one that you can’t see.”

“Not they,” Jill said. “
She
. The fact that the pings are from an administrator address means Daciana, and Daciana only, was looking. Whatever Shannon’s folks are up to, Daciana doesn’t want anyone else to know.”

Annika took a step back from the computer. “This is making my eyes crossed,” she said. “How do you do this all day?”

“It’s my thing, I guess.”

“Now what do we do? It kind of makes me nervous that Daciana was looking at Shannon and she just quit.”

“She may have decided there was nothing to see,” said Jill.

“What about my email address?” Annika said. “The other night in the limo you told me they probably were watching me too, you know, since Shannon and I were in touch.”

“That’s a good idea,” Jill said. “Let’s take a look.”

Jill went to the file she’d created on Annika and Shannon’s secret email conversations. The screen opened to a familiar email about Annika’s summer trip to Cozumel, with all the names changed to aliases from the movie
Crimson Sunrise
.

“So you just went in and read all of this?” Annika said. “I should be angry at you for invading my privacy, you know.”

“You should be dead,” said Jill.

“Good point.”

Jill found the IP address Annika had been using. She pasted it into the computer’s memory then went back to
Clean Street Pings
. She brought up a listing of activity on Annika’s IP address.

“Wow,” Jill said.

“Wow what? Tell me what it means!”

“It’s the same as Shannon’s,” said Jill. “Daciana has been spying on you, but she quit in July. So weird. I think you guys must have gotten boring to her.”

“That, or your program isn’t seeing everything.”

“It’s seeing everything,” said Jill. “I’m certain of it. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll set up an alert to watch for any new activity on your IP and Shannon’s. If Daciana or anyone else decides to come back and look some more, I’ll get a text message so I know right away it’s happened.”

“Shannon and I can just talk about anything until then?” said Annika. “Maybe I should go to Brazil right now while no one’s looking. Maybe I should buy my plane ticket and go be with her.”

“You should wait,” said Jill, thinking of how disastrous it would be for Nicky’s Coronation campaign if Annika up and left. “Something has led Daciana to think you and Shannon aren’t saying anything of interest. But if you disappear…”

“Right, I see what you’re saying. If I disappear I’ll draw their attention again.”

Jill opened a new program on her computer and began typing.

“I’m going to set up a secure line between you and Shannon,” she said. “Let me see your phone.”

“You can just…do that?” Annika said, pulling her phone from her handbag and giving it to Jill.

“It’s all about Clean Street,” Jill said. “The immortals use that software for everything. Learn how to fool Clean Street and you’ve learned how to fool the immortals.”

Knowing that the computer code might as well be Swahili to Annika’s eyes, Jill let her sit and watch as she extended the Marsh Hawk Protocol to Annika and Shannon’s phones. It was a simple operation, one Jill performed every time someone new was allowed into the Network. It was the same coding that allowed her to speak freely on the phone with Nicky, Gia, Alvin, and everyone else. It was a form of encryption that made the phone invisible to all the spying eyes floating in the ether.

Gia wouldn’t approve of extending this privilege to people not in the Network, people like Annika and Shannon, but Jill figured it was worth it. Annika was an integral part of the mission, whether she knew it or not.

“There, all done,” Jill said.

“All done, as in…we’re safe to talk?”

“You can call Shannon right now,” Jill said. “When you do, tell her that your conversation is protected, so long as you are on that phone.”

Annika’s face lit up as she dialed Shannon’s phone number.

“Hello. Guess who this is?” Annika spoke into the phone. “Yes it’s me! No, don’t hang up—we’re totally safe. Jill encrypted the line for us…..yes, that Jill! Yes, I’m sure. Sweetie, the things this girl can do with a computer…I have so much to tell you! Hold on, let’s do face to face. I want to see you.”

Annika turned to Jill. “It’s safe for me to do face to face, right?”

Jill nodded.

Annika pulled the phone away and pressed a button on the screen. The look in Annika’s eyes when Shannon’s face came on her phone….it made Jill happy and envious at the same time.

“Oh my God, Baby. It’s so amazing to see you!”

Annika was crying now. It was a side of her Jill had never seen. Confident, put-together Annika Fleming was crying tears of joy. Feeling suddenly out of place in her own bedroom, Jill stood up and went for the door, whispering, “Take all the time you need.”

Chapter 14

Knowing Annika’s phone call with Shannon would go deep into the afternoon, Jill stretched out on the couch in the den. She slept there until her father came through the front door after seven.

“What are you doing down here?” he asked. It was a reasonable question, but one that he wouldn’t have asked a week ago. The Masquerade and all the fallout from Nicky’s arrival had changed their relationship, and now Walter Wentworth was doing his best to be friendly with his daughter.

“I was just leaving,” Jill said. She was already off the couch and headed back to the stairs when her father stopped her with a question.

“I heard you weren’t at school today. Is that true?”

“Since when do you pay attention to what I’m doing at school, Dad?”

He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Why didn’t you go to school? What are you up to?”