The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (39 page)

Nicky stepped closer. She saw
the body of a feral vampire on the ground. Falkon was cradling its head in his
hands.

“I wanted to bring her back,” he
said. “I wanted to complete my research and bring her back. And now…”

It was her mother. The vampire
that had once been Celeste Amanda Allen was lying dead in Falkon’s arms.

On Monday morning, Jill gathered
Annika, Mattie, and Jenny in the senior parking lot.

“I’ve solved the second Ransom
clue,” she said.

“No way!” said Mattie. “What is
it?”

“It’s the Washington Monument,”
Jill said, “and don’t look at me like that. The reason everyone else who went
to the Monument found nothing is because they didn’t know where to look. The
clue was in the stairs.”

“There are stairs in the
Washington Monument?” said Jenny.

“Here, have a look,” said Jill,
handing over her phone. A picture of the six-hundred-and-fifty-seventh stair
was on the screen, with the tile removed and the last clue exposed.

“An expression of mortal
frailty,” Jenny read aloud. “Oh God, this sounds hard already.”

“Jill will figure it out,” said
Annika. “She always does.”

“Death and new life made
manifest, in the throes of agony eternal,” Jenny continued. “Geez, why are the
clues so hard this year?”

“Same drill as last time?” said
Annika.

“Yes,” said Jill. “Now you guys
know where to find the second rose. By the end of the day, we need for the
whole school to know it.”

“You know, there really isn’t
much time left if you think about it,” said Mattie. “Thanksgiving is only a
couple weeks away. If we don’t have the clue solved by then--”

“We’ll solve it,” said Jill.
“You guys have work to do. Hop to it.”

When she went home that
afternoon, she heard a sound that was entirely unfamiliar to her. Her parents
were fighting.

“What do you mean you don’t want
to do it?” Walter was yelling. “Since when do we care about what you want?”

“I’m busy with my own work!”
Carolyn screamed. “Leave me alone! I’m onto something here but I need time to
figure it out!”

It sounded like they were
upstairs, but not all the way in Carolyn’s study. Jill rolled her eyes,
realizing they were probably in her bedroom.

“What do you mean your own
work?” Walter said. “What the hell are you working on?”

“I said leave me alone!”

Jill stepped into the bedroom.

“Is everything alright up here?”
she said.

“Jill, I’m glad you’re here,”
said Walter. “Something’s wrong with your mother.” There was a hint of panic in
his voice. “Do you know what she’s doing? Why is she working on your laptop?”

Jill turned to look at her
mother, who was crouched over Jill’s desk. At any time, Carolyn could have
moved the laptop to her own study. It was interesting to Jill that she had
chosen to leave it here.

“Let me talk to her, Dad,” Jill
said. “Why don’t you go downstairs for a bit?”

“Okay, but tell her we need her
on the Gansfeld software. It took me more than a month in Seattle to close that
deal, and now she doesn’t want to write the code!”

“I’ll talk to her,” Jill said.
“Please, get out of here.”

Walter left the room in a huff.
Jill closed the door behind him and locked it.

“Mom?” she said.

“Just a minute, please. I want to
finish this algorithm.”

Jill walked up to her mother,
slowly. The woman was a mess. Her hair was greasy and in tangles. Her eyes were
red. Her clothes were wrinkled.

“How long have you been working
on this, Mom?” Jill said.

Carolyn ignored her and continued
typing. Jill sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

When Carolyn finally turned to
her, Jill saw bags under her eyes and cracks on her lips.

“I had an idea last night,”
Carolyn said. “It woke me up. I went for a walk as I thought it through. Can
you imagine? I was out for a walk in the middle of the night, thinking.”

“Yes, I can imagine,” Jill said.
She had done the same thing many times herself.

“I wonder why I never thought to
go walking before,” Carolyn said. “It’s such a good way to clear the mind and
focus on a problem.”

“What problem, Mom? What are you
doing?”

“I’ve found the answer we’ve
been looking for,” Carolyn said. “A hidden operating system using dual-key
encryption.”

There was a crazed look in
Carolyn’s eyes. In all her years of living with this woman she had never seen
anything like this. Carolyn Wentworth, whose normal disposition was somewhere
between bored and robot, looked like a warrior about to go into battle.

“You’re talking about Renata’s
phone, right?” Jill said.

“What else would I be talking
about?” said Carolyn. “The hard drive has been partitioned in a way that we
could only see a fraction of it. The part we can see is what you hacked into.
The other part, the much larger part, masks a second operating system.”

Jill leaned back on the bed.

“That’s interesting,” Jill said.
She felt like she’d just been stumped on a trivia question and now someone was
telling her the answer. “How big is this hidden partition?”

“500 gigabytes,” said Carolyn.

“Are you serious? On a phone? No
wonder why it took so long.”

“So long to what?”

“To hack,” said Jill. “When I
did the hack in Renata’s crypt, it took forever. It didn’t make any sense to me
at the time, but if there’s a hidden 500 gig hard drive on the phone…you said
there’s another operating system?”

“Yes!” Carolyn said. “That
operating system you cracked open was just a decoy. The real one sits
underneath, encrypted with a dual-key scheme.”

Jill detected a hint of judgment
in Carolyn’s voice, as if Jill should have figured this out already.

Carolyn brought up a picture on
the computer screen. A pie chart showing disk drive space. Used and available,
colored red and blue respectively. Carolyn explained to Jill what they were
looking at, and why there had to be more computer memory that was hidden to
them.

It was strange, maybe even
surreal, to have her mother speaking to her like this. It was like her mother
was giving her a lecture on the basics of computer hacking. An angry lecture.
As Carolyn went through a full deconstruction of the software on Renata’s
phone, she pointed out all of Jill’s mistakes, all the things Jill should have
seen, all the sloppiness of her hack.

It was hard for Jill to listen
to, and she found herself on the defensive.

“We had so little time to do the
hack,” she said. “Tarin had to get back to his post. I had to return to the
party.”

“It would have been faster if
you had done it right from the beginning,” Carolyn said.

“It’s easy for you to say. We’re
sitting in the safety of my bedroom right now, but I cracked this phone when I
was inside Renata’s mansion.”

“You have to keep a cool head
when you’re doing computer work,” said Carolyn. “If you can’t, you shouldn’t be
doing it.”

“I don’t appreciate you speaking
to me this way,” said Jill.

“I’m your mother and I’ll speak
to you how I please,” said Carolyn.

“My mother! You’ve never…I can’t
believe you—ah!”

Jill paced across the room. “I
can’t do this right now!” she said. “I can’t talk to you because I don’t even
know who you are! What happened up there with Tarin the other night? What did
you talk about?”

“Tarin helped me see the truth
of things,” said Carolyn. “I know who I am. I know what your father has done.
And I know what I must do. Now, can we please get back to work? I haven’t even
shown you the interesting part yet.”

“But that’s it! Somebody tells
you that your husband enslaved you to your own wedding vows, and you’re just
ready to get to work! Mom, aren’t you the least bit sad? Don’t you feel
confused? Or angry? Aren’t you angry? Because I sure am!”

Carolyn turned her chair to face
Jill and leaned forward.

“Listen to me, carefully,” she
said. “Sadness and anger are a waste of everybody’s time.” She had that look in
her eyes again. The crazed soldier about to go off and fight. “You only get so
many hours on this earth and it is your responsibility to make the best use of
them. We have the opportunity to do something useful right now. Figuring out
how to get into Renata’s phone is important. Tarin told me so.”

“It’s important to him!” Jill
said. “It’s important to the Network! But I’m more concerned about you, Mom. I
want to know that you’re okay.”

“I’ve never been better in all
my life! Now please quit talking so I can show you what I’ve found!”

Carolyn shrieked out that last
line in a voice that gave Jill goosebumps. This wasn’t at all how she had
imagined things would be when her mother was free of her programming. Carolyn
Wentworth might have been free of the command to live as her husband’s slave,
but she wasn’t free of herself. She was so focused on work that even trying to
talk to her about something else made her shriek like a crazy person.

I need to be patient
,
Jill told herself.
She is the victim, not me
.

“Okay, Mom. Show me what you
want me to see. I won’t interrupt again.”

The transformation in Carolyn was
instant. Back to her normal voice, she continued her presentation about the
hard drive in Renata’s phone.

“As I was saying, there is a
second, hidden operating system that lurks below the surface. That is why we
aren’t seeing anything of substance when we spy on Renata. There are two
versions of this phone inside the same machine!”

“One that we can see,” Jill
said.

“Yes, we have full access to the
one you hacked. That is the decoy.”

“And the real phone, the one she
uses for all the conversations we really want access to, is hidden away.”

“Not just hidden,” said Carolyn.
“Encrypted. If we are going to crack open this phone so Tarin can see and hear
everything Renata is doing with it, we have to crack the encryption code. It’s
dual key. Do you know about dual key encryption?”

Jill gave a gentle nod of her
head, trying not to laugh. Asking a hacker in the Network if she knew about
dual key encryption was like asking a spider if it knew about silk.

“The data gets encoded with a
string of numbers and letters, and can only be unlocked with a matching
string,” Carolyn went on. “I’ve written many programs over the years that seek
out and try to break dual encryption strings. Last night I ran all of them on
Renata’s phone. I found the encryption string.”

“You found it already? Then all
we have to do is crack it.”

“It’s not that easy,” said
Carolyn. “Let me show you.”

Carolyn grabbed a piece of paper
off the desk and handed it to Jill. A single page that had come out of Jill’s
printer, showing a long string of numbers and letters.

e4c5Nf3d6Bb5+Bd7…

“Yeah, that definitely looks
like an encryption string,” said Jill. “But you could crack this. There’s
enough computing power on the servers in the basement--”

“No amount of computing power in
the world can crack this code,” said Carolyn. “That’s what is so clever about
it. It is constantly changing.”

“What? How can that be?”

“I don’t know, but it is.
Several times a day, the string changes. They are short changes, just a couple
letters and numbers, but it’s enough to throw off my attempts to crack it. Look
at this.” Carolyn grabbed another sheet of paper from the desk. This one had
only a few letters and numbers on it, handwritten in pencil.

Qb8 Na5

“Somewhere on Renata’s phone,
there is software that is rewriting the encryption string every few hours,”
said Carolyn.

“That’s wild,” said Jill.

“It’s unprecedented!” said
Carolyn. “It’s amazing! Whoever wrote this software for her has done something
I’ve never seen before!”

A banging on the bedroom door
interrupted them.

“What’s happening in there?”
Walter yelled. “Carolyn, I need you! I told them I’d have sample code by
tomorrow!”

“Ugh! Your father is driving me
crazy!”

“Ignore him,” Jill said. “I’ll
talk to him later.”

Walter’s banging got faster and
more violent. He was like a spoiled brat having a temper tantrum out there.

“I am working!” Carolyn shouted.
“Go away!”

Walter banged on the door even
more. “This is not acceptable! What’s happened to you?”

Carolyn put her hands over her
ears and leaned in close to the computer screen. Outside the door, the banging
turned to deep, loud thumps, one after another.

“Is he kicking my door?” Jill
said. “Dad! Whatever you’re doing, stop it!”

A final thump and the door burst
open, with splinters flying out of the doorframe. Walter apparently wasn’t
expecting the door to give. He fell into the bedroom, crashing into Jill’s end
table and sending papers everywhere.

“What’s the matter with you?”
Jill said.

Walter pushed himself up on his
hands and knees. “Jill, get out of here! You’ve tried talking to her. Now it’s
my turn!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said
Jill. “You need to settle yourself down.”

Walter was up on his feet now.
His face was bright red. His whole body was moving up and down with each
hurried breath.

“Jill this is not your
business,” he wheezed. He tried pushing Jill out of the way but she slapped his
hand back.

“You watch yourself young lady,”
he said.

“Or what, Dad? Are you gonna hit
me?”

“Don’t test me. I was raised in
a house where children were taught to respect their elders.”

“You don’t deserve my respect!
You wanna know why Mom’s not following your orders anymore?”

“What did you say to me?”

“I know the truth, Dad. Mom does
too. The other night, when you got drunk off your ass, you told me that Melissa
Mayhew programmed mom to be a slave to her own wedding vows.”