by Sandra Block
“Unless…” I say, as an idea comes to me. My right brain working.
“Unless what?” She narrows her eyes in a question.
“Unless you bring me in with you.”
“How do I do that? Sneak you in under my trench coat?” She stretches out her arm, and I follow the ivy tattoo lacing up her arm. I touch a leaf, gently, and she smiles and puts her hand over my finger.
“No,” I say. “You wear a camera.”
Chapter Sixty
Dahlia
“Are you insane?” Eli asks, fully dismayed.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s adorable. Admit it.” I’m pointing at the necklace on the computer screen, the one that James and I picked out, which also happens to be a spy camera and which should arrive at my apartment by tomorrow. All on James’s credit card for now, because Dennis said there’s a few more hurdles to jump, but hopefully I’ll have my identity cleared soon. He wouldn’t comment on how soon though.
“So let me get this straight.” Eli puts his beer bottle down with a thud, and Simone lifts her head from between us, then dips it down again. “You’re going straight to their little hidey-hole for some stupid box? You could be walking right into a trap here.”
“Please, it’s a final club. Not a Turkish prison.”
“This is stupid. Ridiculous.” He shakes his head. “They already tried to get you once, Dahlia.”
“And failed.”
“Which was just damn luck,” he admonishes.
I pet Simone, who opens one eye at me, then sleepily closes it again. “That’s why we have the camera. So James can keep an eye on me.”
Eli snorts at this. “Excuse me for not being comforted by this.” He takes a swig of his beer. “He might be James, but he’s not James Bond.”
“Ha, ha, ha.”
“I’m not joking,” he complains, getting up and heading to the refrigerator. The light gives him a ghostly glow. As the door whooshes shut, he returns with another beer. “When is this party anyway?”
I look at my phone. “January tenth. It’s a Friday night.”
He stares at me. “That’s only a few weeks away.”
I shrug. “More than enough time to prepare.”
“Don’t do this, Dahlia. Please.” He puts his hands in a prayer position. “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”
“I’m not trying to,” I insist. “This is not just about me anymore.”
He rakes his hand through his hair. “Don’t you get it? You’ve won. You don’t need to do any of this.” The hoppy scent of beer comes off his breath. “You’ve got your Harvard degree now. You can go do that Stanford thing. You know…just do it. Live your life already.”
“I will,” I say, patting his knee. “Once I shut them down. I promise you. I will.”
• • •
The phone wakes me up at 3:30 a.m.
I grab it, not recognizing the number. “Hello?” There is a long pause, then crying. Noises in the background. People yelling and laughing. Banging, clanking sounds. “Who is this?”
A soft crying.
“Shoshana?” I ask.
“Tell them it isn’t true, Dahlia.” The voice is strained, husky.
“Who is this?” I repeat.
“It’s Henry.”
In a stuporous confusion, I try to think of any Henrys that I know. Then a chill courses through me. Henry Holstein.
“I’m sorry,” he cries. “I’m sorry I did that to you.”
I don’t answer.
“But,” he whispers, “tell them you’re lying about it.” I hear his rapid breathing. “They’re gonna hurt me…bad…and I didn’t do it. Just tell them. I’ll admit to the…what happened that night. I’ll admit to that. Just tell them I didn’t do this,” he pleads, a sort of keening desperation in his voice. “Please. You have no idea what they’ll do to me.”
I think about it for a movement. I can hear the fear in his voice, and I don’t like to make people suffer.
But I think to minute 6:28, where Blake Roberts was sodomizing me and Henry Holstein climbed up to try to rape me vaginally at the same time. “DP!” he yelled, bowled over with laughter. “Double penetration!” His face was jubilant. “DP! DP!” There was a crying sound from the mattress, and Blake said, “Wait your own fucking turn,” and pushed him on the chest. Then, Blake repositioned himself to get back to the business of anally raping me.
“I do have an idea,” I say. “Of what they’ll do to you. I have a very good idea.”
There is soft crying again. “I’m sorry, Dahlia. I’m sorry. Please.”
“Don’t call me again,” I say. And I hang up.
Chapter Sixty-One
HAWK CLUB CHAT ROOM
Bruinsblow: We got a situation here.
Desiforever: No shit, Sherlock
Bruinsblow: Yeah well, nobody believed me before. Everyone was all—calm down Drew. No big deal.
PorscheD: What happened?
Creoletransplant: Holts got arrested. No bail.
Mollysdad: What for?
Bruinsblow: Kiddie porn
Mollysdad: Ew. Good then. Who gives a shit?
Bruinsblow: He was FRAMED
Taxman: How do you know that?
Bruinsblow: He told me. Someone planted porn on his work computer.
Mollysdad: Sounds suspicious though
Bruinsblow: HE WAS FRAMED
Joe225: Dude, stop shouting
Bruinsblow: Do you guys possibly see a pattern here? First Graham, now Holts?
Taxman: And you’re sure it’s that Dahlia girl behind this?
Bruinsblow: Who else? He said someone sent part of the video with him in it again. She’s not fighting fair here. Kiddie porn? Who knows what she’ll do next?
Mollysdad: Who took the fucking video anyway?
Taxman: Who knows? We don’t even know who put it out there
Mollysdad: Who was filming this one though?
Joe225: No clue. Could be any of us.
Desiforever: Could be someone not active anymore. I was pretty fucked up that night. Don’t remember.
Taxman: I thought it was someone new? Someone who didn’t last very long?
PorscheD: Are those guys even still doing the party?
Desiforever: For now.
Joe225: How do you know?
Desiforever: I know one of the new guys. He interned over the summer with us. Christian Ford.
Creoletransplant: Maybe it’s time to wrap that shit up.
Desiforever: Not for us to say
Bruinsblow: Listen. We don’t have to worry about those guys right now. We have to worry about us.
Taxman: What happened with Blake R? I thought he was on top of this.
Desiforever: He said he would take care of it.
Bruinsblow: Doing what?
Desiforever: He said he was going to do something personal. “Very personal.” That’s all he said.
Bruinsblow: Yeah, well tell him about Holts. Maybe that’ll light a fire under his ass. He needs to get very personal soon here.
Chapter Sixty-Two
James
“For the whole summer?” I hope the question didn’t sound as panicked as I feel. But it probably did. I’m not good at hiding things like that. I feel like someone just sent a shock wave through my motherboard.
“I may be going there for the summer,” Dahlia says evenly. “Meaning, I applied. I probably won’t even get in. But I wanted you to know.”
I think about it for a half second. “You’re smart. You probably got good grades.” She half shrugs, which means yes. “You probably will get in.”
“Who knows?”
I feel my heart going faster, so that it almost hurts. “And then you’ll get into the law school, and then you’
ll be there forever.”
“Whoa, whoa there,” she says, lifting her hand in a stop pantomime. “Let’s see if I even get into the summer program first. And if I do, I’m not even sure I can afford it, so…”
I can feel myself calming down, because I have a great idea how law school could work out just fine. “There are probably a lot of places in Boston you could get into also. Maybe you should apply to a summer program here.”
“Maybe,” she says, and I can’t tell if she means it.
“Let’s see,” I say and type Boston law schools into Google. “Suffolk Law School. That one would work.” I tilt my screen to show her. “That’s got a crazy-high acceptance rate. So even you should get in.”
She chuckles. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that.” I move down the list. “Boston University, where Eli went. They’ve got a summer program too. But, oh no. That’s really expensive.”
“It’s okay, James. I’ll figure it out,” she says, brushing my shoulder with her arm, which is her way of brushing me off too but nicely. Rob once told me, “Sometimes you don’t know when to give it a rest.” Since then, I’ve always tried to give it a rest when need be.
“So,” she says, standing up abruptly from the couch. Simone opens one eye in response. “Are we going to do this thing or what?”
She’s referring to the reason I came over, to set up the necklace and the computer. “All right,” I say. “Let’s get it going.” As I start setting up the program, she fingers the necklace, which looks incredible on her.
“So, how does this work?” she asks. “The camera feeds into the computer?”
“Eventually. The camera transmits to it.”
She is leaning in toward me, and I catch a faded scent of freesia. “How far can it go and still transmit?”
“About 150 feet. Give or take. I don’t know. I figure we’ll test it.”
She leans her elbow on the table, even closer to me. “That doesn’t seem very far.” She reaches down to pet Simone, whose tail lashes against my leg.
“Yeah, the high-powered ones will get you two thousand feet. But they probably wouldn’t have fit in the necklace. And we don’t need that anyway. Because I’ll be right across the street, parked in the car with my laptop.”
“True. You’re too smart,” she says and tickles me under my chin like I’m the cat. And I absolutely don’t mind. The computer sounds, signaling the download is complete, and she looks up from the screen. “It’s ready?”
“Yup. So we have to turn on the camera.” I look down at the black, beady eye with the fake diamond in the middle.
“Oh yeah.” She fumbles with the necklace. “It’s somewhere on the back of it…”
“Here, let me see.”
She lifts her head, exposing her delicate, pale neck, and I turn the evil eye over. My fingers are awkward, too big on the little pendant, but I find the button finally. A crunch of feedback sounds over the speaker, then an image of my jaw looms up embarrassingly close on the screen, showing my birthmark and a trace of stubble and the stupid cleft that I hate, but which Dahlia told me makes me look like a superhero.
“How about that?” She glances at the screen. “It actually works.” She twirls around, whirring the room on the computer. Then she stops and the image stills.
“Pretty crisp picture,” I say, and we both stand there, admiring the computer. “Go into another room. Let’s check the audio.”
Her footsteps pad into the bedroom, and I see the corner of a soft, purple comforter. A desk stacked with books. “Testing, one two three,” she says.
The audio comes in a bit fuzzy but definitely audible. “I can hear you,” I call to her. “Just one more thing. I want to check out the range.”
“Yeah, but I’m starved,” she says, walking back into the room.
“Me too. It won’t take long though—”
“How about this?” She shrugs on her coat. “I’ll go down the street to pick up the Thai, and you let me know when you lose me.”
“Okay. That should work.” I look around the room. “I’ll flick off the lights when I can’t see you anymore.”
She nods and grabs her purse. The screen dips to the floor a minute, then pops back up.
And the necklace works. Perfectly. All the way down the stairs and the street. The night looks soft and pretty on the screen, the streetlights and the storefronts. And as she keeps up a running commentary, I can hear every word. At about three hundred feet, the screen starts to stutter, fading in and out of a grainy, dotted picture, then goes black. And I flick the light on and off, then keep it off. Three hundred feet. Not bad. Even better than I expected. We probably won’t even need that much distance.
Then it hits me like a ton of bricks. Which is another stupid idiom, as no one would survive such a thought. But anyway, I think of it, right then, and realize I’m an idiot not to have thought of it before.
A transmitter. Of course.
And I know how we can hack into Blake Roberts’s computer.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Dahlia
“So, explain it again,” I say.
We are finishing breakfast at a secluded table in the basement cafeteria. James has already tried to explain the hacking technique multiple times, and it still won’t sink in. He was so excited about the idea last night that he went right home after our Thai food to research it. And since it was a work night, I supposed it was just as well.
“Okay,” he says with a tincture of impatience. “We get the cell phone.”
“Uh-huh.” I am peeling an orange, getting skin in my fingernails. “But how does that get into the computer?”
“That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t.” He unwraps another portion of his protein bar. “We’re just using it as a receiver. The computer lets off EMF emissions, right?”
“Um, right,” I answer, though I never knew this was a fact.
“So, we can capture data from that. But we just need a receiver. And your basic cell phone is…” He waits for my response.
“A receiver?”
“Yes!” His face is puppy-dog excited with my good guess.
I swallow an orange section, which is slightly bitter. “But how are you going to get a cell phone into his office?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” he says. “It’s like the transmitter in your necklace. If the signal is strong enough, it doesn’t have to be in the same room. A hundred, two hundred feet away is fine.” He tosses the yogurt container in a nearby garbage. “Turns out the Israelis have been doing this for years.”
“Of course they have.” I wrap the orange peel up in my napkin.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Jews are smart.”
James tilts his head. “Isn’t that racist or something?”
I smile. “Not if I say it.”
He smiles back. “Right.” At that, we both stand up and he tosses his protein bar wrapper into the garbage and me my decimated orange peel. “There’s one minor thing though,” James says as we enter the stale-smelling stairwell. “We still have to get the malware on his computer.”
I start climbing up and let out an audible sigh. “Then we’re back to square one, right? How are we going to do that?”
Our footsteps clang together on the stairs. “That’s the thing,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be a big virus or anything. Just a couple of lines of code. We can slip that through in an email.”
“We can?” I am breathing a bit heavily keeping up with him, which tells me I have to get back to kickboxing.
“Definitely,” he answers as we get to his floor. Mine is one more up. “But we just have to figure out who’s going to email him.”
“What do you mean?”
He leans his elbow against the gray concrete wall. “I
t has to be from someone he trusts. Or at least someone tempting enough for him to open it without thinking.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, and at once think of who it has to be, of course. Who would tempt him so mightily, he couldn’t help but open it.
• • •
After Sylvia goes to lunch, I make the call.
“Of course I’ll do it,” Daisy answers. “But I can’t guarantee he’ll open it.”
I shift the phone on my ear. “He gave you his frigging hotel key. He’ll open it.”
She sighs into the phone. “Most men do think with their penises.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“So, what should it say?” she asks. “Hard sell? Soft sell? What are we thinking here?”
I have to admire her business school approach to the problem. “The subject line is key,” I say. “Maybe ‘get-together this weekend?’ That would definitely pique his attention.”
“Yes, it would.”
“Then just put in some bullshit about how you’re not getting along with your fiancé and wanted a mindless, fun trip and he came to mind.”
“You think he’ll buy that?” she asks, sounding unconvinced.
“It doesn’t really matter. From what James told me, all he has to do is open the damn thing.”
“Good point.”
“And James will send you the code for the virus to include in the email.”
“Okay.” She pauses then. “But, Dahlia…”
“What?” I sense the misgiving in her voice.
“I don’t know how to put this exactly, but this one. Blake Roberts. He’s a big fish. He’s not some cokehead or teacher or whatever. He’s got lawyers, spokespeople, all that crap.”
I tap my pen on my legal pad. “Okay?”
“I’m just saying, you come at him, and he could really hurt you. I don’t have to tell you how the game is played. He’ll get you for defamation. He’ll countersue. He’ll bankrupt you in, like, ten seconds.”
“No problem,” I say with a chortle. “They’ve already done that.”
“Just think about it,” she says. “Be sure you really want to do this. It might not be worth it in the end.”