The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (43 page)

“It was the only way I could
think of switching it out without her noticing,” Jill said.

“I used a similar tactic to
switch it back,” said Annika. “While I was holding the ring, I stretched my
elbow a bit too far and accidentally spilled my drink to distract her. It was
so much fun! Anyway, you may rest assured that the genuine ring is now safely
on Karmela’s finger. This is the imitation.”

Jill held the ring up to the
light. It had been weeks since she’d thought about this thing.

“It was a good plan,” Annika
said. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if that ring were on Nicky’s finger right now?”

“It would make everything a lot
easier,” said Jill. She turned the ring over in her hands, looking at the
engraving on the underside.

“It’s a really nice-looking
ring,” said Annika.

“You want it?” said Jill. “It’s
worthless to me now.”

Jill handed the ring back to
Annika, who tried putting it on her finger.

“It’s a little small for me,”
she said. “But you know, it might be a good fit on Shannon.”

“You’re going to see her soon,
aren’t you?” said Jill.

Annika nodded. “My plane leaves
tomorrow morning.”

“Nice,” said Jill. “Party all
night, sleep on the long flight.”

“Exactly. We’re not actually
celebrating my eighteenth birthday tonight, even though that’s what everyone
thinks.  We’re really celebrating my escape. Can I show you how I made my bag?
I’m really proud of it.”

Jill was about to answer no,
that she’d rather not see the bag, she’d rather not know the names on Annika’s
phony passports, and she wished she didn’t even know where Annika was going,
but her cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts.

“Hang on,” she said. “My mom has
become really high maintenance lately. This will be quick.”

She pulled the phone from her
pocket and saw that it wasn’t her mom’s name on the screen.

“Caller unknown,” Jill murmured.

“Ooo…a late night mystery
caller,” Annika said with a grin. “I wonder who it could be.”

“Me too,” Jill said. Tarin had
never once tried to reach her by phone, but if he needed her tonight, phone was
the best way. It wasn’t like he could just sneak into Annika’s party.

“Hang on a sec. I’m gonna see
who this is,” Jill said. She pressed answer and held the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Jill, are you someplace safe? I
need your help right away. I don’t have much time.”

Jill recognized the voice at
once but refused to believe her ears.

“Who is this?” Jill said.

“It’s me, Jill. It’s Nicky.”

*****

Nicky was staring at the
computer screen, which was black, save a few letters of text and a blinking
cursor.

“Nicky! Where are you?” cried
Jill from the other end of the phone. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Nicky said. “I’ll
tell you everything later, okay? Right now, I need your help with something
urgent.”

“Okay, I’m listening,” said
Jill.

“I need to erase a hard drive on
this computer in a way that it can never, ever be recovered.”

“A computer? You’re on a
computer?”

Not just one computer
,
Nicky thought, her eyes glancing at the stacks of interconnected computers all
around her.

“It’s Falkon Dillinger’s
computer,” said Nicky. “He and Renata are up to something terrible. But all
their work is stored on this computer. We need to erase everything on it.”

“Falkon Dillinger? Where the
hell are you, Nicky?”

She heard movement outside the
computer room. “There’s no time!” she said. “Just tell me how to do this. Is
there a simple command to erase everything?”

“Nicky, I don’t know. What kind
of computer is it?”

Nicky looked at the command
prompt blinking on the screen.

User Session Ended

“I think it kicked me out,”
Nicky said.

“What do you mean?”

“I was doing something I wasn’t
supposed to. I think the machine kicked me out. I should log back in, right?”

“Do you know how to log in?”

“Yes.”

“Then yeah, sure, log in. Tell
me what you see.”

Nicky typed
C Allen
in
the user name field, and
Two Queens
in the password field.

“Invalid password,” she said,
reading the message that came back on her screen.

“Nicky, talk to me. What are you
trying to do?”

“Hang on. I put a space in the
password. There’s no space. Let me try again.” Speaking the password aloud as
she typed it, Nicky entered
TwoQueens
.

“Two queens?” said Jill. “Is
that a password?”

Text start floating up and down
Nicky’s screen. “Yes, that was it,” she said. “I’m back in.”

“Back in what? What kind of
computer is this?”

“A really, really big one. Lots
of computers connected together. A room as big as a house.”

“That doesn’t help me Nicky.
What does it say on your screen?”

Nicky began reading from the
top. “Ventigen 1100 MCP Operating System Level 286P. Does that mean anything to
you?”

“It sounds like custom written
software,” Jill said. “MCP stands for Master Control Program. I think this
system is really old. We can figure this out. What we’ll have to do is bypass
the operating system and talk to the compiler. How much time do you have?”

Nicky looked through the glass.
She thought she saw a shadow move out there.

“Not much time at all,” she
said. “I managed to get Falkon out of here, but he might come back. He might
come back really soon.”

“That’s no good, Nicky. We need
time to pull this off. Could you give me an IP address? Since we know the
password maybe I could break in from here and you could get out of there.”

“I don’t think it’s even
connected to the Internet.”

“Nicky, is it really important
that you do this? I mean, it sounds like you’re in trouble. Don’t you think you
should get out of there?”

“It’s very important! It’s
everything, Jill! More important than anything we’ve ever done. If I have to
die here, it will be worth it if we can wipe out this machine!”

“If I just had time, I could do
it, Nicky!”

“We don’t have time! Falkon’s
coming back any minute now!”

“But I don’t know anything about
that operating system. I suppose we could start messing around with things and
seeing what…”

Jill trailed off and Nicky heard
nothing but silence.

“Jill?” Nicky said. “Jill, are
you there?”

“I’m here. Hang on for just a
second. I’m going to conference somebody in on this.”

“Good idea. Maybe Alvin knows
something.”

“No, not Alvin. Just a minute,
Nicky.”

A few clicks on Jill’s end, then
the sound of a phone ringing as they waited for a third party to pick up.

“Nicky, we’re bringing my mother
onto the line,” said Jill.

“Your mother? But she won’t--”

“There is a lot you don’t know,
okay? A lot has happened while you’ve been gone. You’re just going to have to
trust me on this. My mother will help us. You let me do all the talking.”

A click on the other end, then
Carolyn Wentworth came on the line. “Jill, where are you? I’ve been working on
this partition algorithm by myself all day!”

“Hi Mom. I’ve got Nicky Bloom on
the other line. You remember Nicky, right?”

“Well, yes, but isn’t Nicky--”

“Nicky is in the Network, Mom.
Just like us.”

Nicky nearly dropped the phone.
Jill’s mom knew she was in the Network? When did that happen?

“Is Nicky helping us with our
task?” Carolyn said. “Because our task is urgent.”

“Nicky’s task is even more
urgent, and the Network wants you to help her with it.”

“They do? Did Tarin tell you
this?”

“Yes, Mom. He wants you to help
Nicky with a computer running the Ventigen 1100 MCP. Do you know that operating
system?”

“Well I should say so,” said Carolyn.
“I wrote it.”

“Then you know the command to
wipe out a hard disk, don’t you Mom?”

“There are many ways to wipe out
a hard disk in the 1100 MCP.”

“But we want to do it in a way
that no data can ever be recovered,” said Jill.

“Which hard disk do you wish to
erase?” Carolyn said.

“All of them,” said Nicky. “When
we’re done, I need this entire computer to be a blank slate that can never come
back.”

“Okay,” said Carolyn. “Nicky,
are you ready to start typing?”

“I’m ready Mrs. Wentworth.”

What followed was a minute of
absolute gobbledy-gook. Letters, semi-colons, backslashes and question marks—it
was the sort of absurdity that absolutely no one should have stored away in
their mind. Hearing Carolyn spit off the command, one letter after another,
without ever taking a pause to think, was one of the strangest experiences of
Nicky’s life.

“That will do it,” Carolyn said.
“Hit enter and that computer will zero out all its memory.”

Right as Nicky’s finger touched
the Enter key, she heard his voice.

“What are you doing in here?”

She turned to see Falkon
Dillinger breaking through the glass door. He soared across the room, landed
next to her, and threw her out of the way. She flew across the room, her back
crashing hard into the wall.

“No, no, no,  what have you done!”
Falkon yelled.

Nicky couldn’t speak. The air
had been knocked out of her lungs.

“You’ve…oh my God Nicky Bloom
the processes have all stopped! You’re erasing everything!”

Nicky gasped for breath. She
closed her eyes, feeling content. She would die soon. But she would die knowing
she’d done the best she could.

“This command you’ve typed in,”
Falkon said. “Where on earth…how do I stop it?”

“You can’t stop it,” Nicky said.

“But where would a girl like you
learn a command like--”

And then he looked at the phone,
the receiver dangling by its cord off the edge of its desk. He grabbed it and
held it to his ear.

“Who is this!” he shouted. “Who
were you talking to?”

Nicky could tell by the look on
his face that Jill had already hung up. That, or she muted their end of the
call. Nicky closed her eyes and smiled.
Thank you, Jill
she thought
.
I’ll never get to tell you in person, but thank you. You have no idea what
you’ve accomplished.

Gently, Falkon put the telephone
receiver back on its cradle. He looked at the computer screen, which had gone
to black.

“You’re just like your mother,
you know,” he said.

“Yes,” Nicky said. “I am.”

“What just happened?” said
Annika.

Jill shook her head. She didn’t
know the answer.

One minute she was talking to
Nicky, the next, there was a man on the phone demanding to know who was on the
other end. Jill’s mother, God bless her, started to answer him, but Jill muted
the call before she could get her name out.

“You were actually talking to
Nicky?”

“Yes.”

“So do you know where she is?”

“No.”

“But you know the answer to the
clue.”

“No, Nicky didn’t say a thing
about it.”

Jill’s phone began to ring. It
was her mom.

“Annika, I have to go.”

“The immortals are onto you
guys, aren’t they?” Annika said.

Jill was already headed for the
door. Before she opened it, she turned back to Annika and said, “It’s good
you’re getting out now.”

She answered her mom’s call as
she walked out of the party.

“My call dropped,” said Carolyn.
“That man didn’t seem to hear what I was saying, and then it just came to an
end.”

“You didn’t lose the phone
call,” said Jill. “I muted us out. We didn’t want to be speaking to that guy.”

“Who was he?”

“He’s the enemy, Mom. He’s
working with Renata.”

“Oh, yes, then I suppose he
would be the enemy. After all, Tarin told me that hacking into Renata’s phone
is my most important task.”

“Yes, Mom. Now it’s more
important than ever.”

After Jill got home, she and her
mom stayed up all night. They looked over weeks of notes that Carolyn made as
she tried to figure out the ever-evolving encryption code. They both tried in
vain to write a routine that would spot the patterns they had been unable to
see.

At five in the morning, feeling
too spent to continue, Jill went into the master bedroom for a quick nap. She
was standing at the edge of the bed, holding onto the checkerboard quilt, when
it came to her.

Two queens.

“The password Nicky used to get
onto Falkon’s computer was Two Queens,” she whispered.

Her eyes went back to the quilt.
A grid of black and white squares. Looking at it, Jill saw more than a quilt.
She saw a chessboard. A scattering of game pieces on a grid. Knights, rooks,
kings, queens…

She threw the quilt back on the
bed and ran down the hall yelling, “Mom! Mom, I’ve got it!”

Her mom met her in the foyer, a
childlike look of excitement in her eyes.

“You’ve figured out the code?”
she said. “You’ve got the algorithim?”

“There is no algorithm. We’ve
been going about this all wrong. We’ve been so focused on the code we haven’t
been thinking about the users.”

The excitement began to fade
from Carolyn’s eyes.

“So, do you have it or not?” she
said.

“Renata is working with Falkon
Dillinger!” Jill said. “Nicky said his name on the phone!”

“So what?”

“That is the secret Renata is
protecting. That’s why she’s encrypted her phone and put a decoy operating
system on top! She needs to hide her conversations with Falkon.”

“Of course she does, Jill.
Really, these are elementary conjectures. And honestly, Tarin didn’t tell us to
figure out
why
Renata encrypted her phone. He told us to figure out
how
,
so we can decrypt it.”