Her vantage was of the back side of the mansion, encompassing the entire back lawn and all the guest houses. The smallest guest house at the edge of the property was where the corpses were burned. At present it was quiet in that house, but at night the furnace would be fired up in case Renata got hungry and there were remains to be disposed of.
To the right of the crematorium were the servant quarters, a single-story barracks with rows of bunk beds inside. Nicky knew from years of spying on these places that the slaves took turns sleeping. If Frankie wasn’t out at the moment, she only needed to wait. Eventually the crew would change and a new shift would step out of the barracks. Sitting patiently, Nicky catalogued all the slaves that came in and out of view.
There was one tending to the flower garden. Another was edging the lawn. Two more were washing the windows on the mansion. And three more patrolled the gate. Although their guns weren’t visible from here, Nicky knew each of them had a sidearm under his coat. Inside the mansion would be at least two more standing near the windows, each carrying an A-15 rifle on his shoulder.
Morning passed to afternoon without any sighting of Frankie. As long as it takes, Nicky told herself. I’ll stay up here all night if I have to.
She didn’t have to wait that long. A little after one o’clock a small group of slaves lined up in single file to go to the barracks. As one group went in, another came out. Of those coming out, Frankie led the way.
Nicky felt her heart jump at the sight of him. He was tall, so much taller than he had any right to be, so tall she wanted to run up to him and say, ‘When did this happen? When did you get so tall?’
Of course, the last time she saw him they were both eleven years old.
His black hair was dense and curly. His broad chest threatened to break out of the standard-issue white cotton shirt. His neck was thick and his shoulders were wide. The lanky kid she had left behind six years ago had transformed into a beast.
She found herself welling with anger. She thought about Frankie doing hard labor for years, those muscles coming not of his own volition, but as the result of time spent in a Florida prison camp. They had made him big and strong because the strong ones were useful. They had nourished and nurtured him like a grass-fed calf. They wanted him to be a good worker when he was young, and a healthy, tasty dinner when he was of age.
As she watched Frankie set to work in the flower garden, Nicky mapped out an escape plan. She could do it by herself if she had the proper tools. She needed canisters of Addonox, enough to cover the yard in a fog of knockout gas. She needed a mask that would allow her to move through the Addonox unharmed and get to Frankie. She needed a gurney or some sort of cart to roll Frankie out of there—an unfortunate side effect of his bulky frame was that she couldn’t carry him out by herself.
And more than all of this, she needed access. She needed a service ID from Tremblay Property Management that she could show at the front gate and get allowed inside. This, more than anything, was what she had wanted to get out of the TPM database—knowledge of how to forge an all-access pass to Renata’s mansion—it almost certainly would have been doable if Jill had ever decrypted the stolen data.
But she didn’t. The work was unfinished and Jill was MIA.
She pondered more forcible means of entry, from cutting torches that could burn through the back gate to harpoon guns she could use to zip line into the back yard. She looked for weaknesses in their security that could be exploited, but found none. She thought about dressing herself up as a slave and trying to go inside.
Her phone buzzed. Having no intention of answering it, she pulled it from her pocket so she could turn it off, but changed her mind when she saw the name on the screen.
Incoming call from Jill Wentworth.
She pressed answer.
“Hello?”
“Nicky, it’s me. What’s happening? I got Gia’s texts. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Where the hell have you been?” Nicky hissed. “We were panicked that we couldn’t find you.”
“It’s a long story.”
Nicky looked out over the backyard of Renata’s mansion. Suddenly it wasn’t so urgent to break in and rescue Frankie. Suddenly it didn’t make any sense for her to be here at all.
“I can’t talk right now,” she said quietly. “I’ll call you back later. Please call Gia and tell her where you are.”
“Umm…okay, but, can’t you tell me….these texts I got...where are you? It sounds like you’re in a giant birdhouse.”
“Never mind that. Gia will tell you all about it. Goodbye.”
Nicky ended the call and let out a long, slow breath. The relief at hearing Jill’s voice was so intense as to be exhausting, and for a long time, she sat on the tree branch, waiting for the moment to pass.
When it did, and she was ready to get back to her life, she took a last look at Renata’s mansion and said, “See you soon, Frankie. I’m getting you out of here. I promise.”
Chapter 24
Hours before she called Nicky and rejoined the world, Jill woke up in Zack’s bed, his tattooed arm draped over her shoulder.
Still half asleep and not certain what was happening, she almost jumped up and ran. Had Zack not shifted at that moment, had he not used his arm to pull her closer, pushing his chest against her back and kissing her head, had he not made her feel so wanted, so safe, she would have left his apartment then and there and never looked back.
But she didn’t get up. Instead she leaned back in his embrace and weaved her fingers inside his. Zack let out a small moan, and Jill allowed herself to feel as content as he sounded.
After they left the carnival the night before, Zack had offered to take Jill home, and she refused.
“I’m simply having too much fun for the night to end now,” she had said.
They ended up at a diner where they shared a banana split and the sort of effortless conversation on which time can slip away unnoticed. They talked about what they wanted from life, and Jill surprised herself numerous times, saying things like, “I want to enjoy more moments,” and, “I want to be spontaneous,” and, “I want to have fun before I get too old.”
After the diner, Jill asked if Zack had any good movies they could watch at his apartment.
“You’re quite the night owl, aren’t you?” he said.
“Not always, just tonight.”
He took her to a one-bedroom apartment on the bottom floor of an ancient, dilapidated building. As she stepped inside, Jill realized that she had never in her life come this close to how the rest of the world lived. The creaky, wooden floors. The dripping faucet. The smell of mildew behind the walls. The age of the place—a sense that generations of people had come and gone while the apartment remained unchanged…
They never got around to watching a movie. They talked all night instead. They might as well have had all the time in the world for how it seemed to them. In those moments, there was no time. There was only them. There was only the joy of being together.
They migrated to Zack’s bed in the wee hours of the morning and went to sleep fully clothed.
Now it was morning. Now they were lying together in bed, Zack’s arm holding Jill tight, the memories of the night before coming forward and telling her that this was good, that this was where she was supposed to be.
Jill lifted Zack’s hand to her lips and gently kissed his knuckles. His whole body responded. He was holding her now with his arm over her body and his legs tucked underneath hers. Even in the gentle touch of a morning embrace, Jill could feel how strong he was. She felt like he was someone she could trust to look out for her.
And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she relaxed. Without a care in her mind, Jill closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
Zack’s alarm went off a few times that morning. He kept hitting snooze. It was an odd experience for Jill, who had never hit the snooze button in her life. Never before had she enjoyed the pleasures of lying between worlds, waking t
houghts and dreams swirling together like coffee and cream. She dreamt about her trip to Cozumel with Annika and the girls, only she saw the trip in random order, starting with the moment she broke into Annika’s room to hack into her computer, then jumping to the beginning of the trip when they lounged at the pool all day, then jumping again to the very end when everyone climbed onto the plane, half-awake and hung over. The dream felt like it was playing out in random order, until she realized the order matched one of the algorithms she had been working on all week. Her memory of the trip to Cozumel was being scrambled like the data she stole from TPM. If she put the trip back in order again, would she have the solution to her problem? If she decoded this dream, would that in turn decode the stolen data?
In her mind, she pulled apart the various scenes of the dream like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and spread them out before her. There were sixteen scenes in all. She had to find a way to track their starting positions before she rearranged them. Without any thought to it, her mind assigned letters to the scenes. Yes, letters. Just keep those letters attached as you move the pictures around. They will tell you what you need to know.
She scanned the scenes to find a view of the airport, of all the girls walking through the tunnel and into the first class section of the airplane. There it was. Letter C. Like an icon on a touch screen, she grabbed it and dragged it to the top left. Next she found a picture of the woman at the front desk. They were checking into the hotel. Letter A. She put it next in line.
She was amazed at how easy it was to find the right scenes. It was as if her normal mental state was a cluttered room, and this half-asleep state was clean and organized. She could zero in on the correct thought every time, without any effort at all. One after another, she found the right scenes, put them in order, kept the right letters attached, and stored the new sequence.
When she was done she let the scenes fade from her mind so that only the letters remained. The order of these letters would tell her the sequence. They would solve the problem for her. She could write a routine that put the stolen data in the same order as she’d just put these scenes and her problem was solved.
She read the letters carefully.
C-A-R-O-L-Y-N-W-E-N-T-W-O-R-T-H.
What? Carolyn Wentworth? That couldn’t be right. Why would the sequence spell out her mother’s name. What just happened?
She went over the letters again, and suddenly the whole process was illogical to her. There were only sixteen scenes, but there was a letter sequence that stretched the whole alphabet. And some letters were repeated. How was this a meaningful sequence at all?
It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. This was just a nonsensical dream. Jill had allowed herself to believe there was some great meaning to it, but there was no meaning. There was no miracle solution to her data problem to be found in her snooze button slumber.
They got out of bed well after eleven. Jill grabbed for her clothes in a hurried fashion, suspecting it was time for her to leave, but Zack was having none of it.
“There’s an amazing pancake place two blocks over,” he said. “We’re going there.”
Cameron’s was the name of the little café they went to, and, as described, the pancakes were amazing. Outrageously thick, and somehow still perfectly fluffy, with maple syrup that tasted like it had just come out of a tree and butter that made no pretense of being lite or healthy. As they ate, Jill made fun of Zack for the dance he and his snooze button had played all morning.
“I don’t know why I do that,” Zack said. “I guess it would be smarter to leave the alarm off altogether.”
“I’m just razzing you,” Jill said. “I actually liked it. It was fun to be extra lazy like that.”
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” said Zack. “Something about having that alarm go off every twenty minutes makes it even more relaxing. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe it’s about control,” Jill said. “Your alarm clock is the world telling you to get out of bed, and every time you hit snooze you’re telling the world to buzz off. You’re doing what you want to do rather than what somebody else wants you to do.”
“Deep,” said Zack. “You’re quite the philosopher.”
They laughed a lot while they ate breakfast, and Jill marveled at the luxury of a wasted morning. She had always thought that her discipline to get up and get to work on whatever project she had going was a sign that she was in control of her own life.
Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was Zack who really had things under control. Maybe if Jill was being honest with herself she’d be quite happy to live in a low-rent apartment, do whatever she pleased all day long, and sleep all morning if it felt right. Maybe the life she was living wasn’t the life she was choosing. Maybe someone else was choosing it for her. Her parents at first, then the Network.
Maybe even Ryan. Maybe Jill was living her life in some weird deference to him. She was so determined not to be affected by the breakup, not to be the loser who got mopey after she was dumped, that she was being someone she wasn’t.
They finished their giant pancakes as the lunch crowd arrived. The sun was high in the sky when they stepped out the front door.
“I suppose I should go back to Potomac at some point,” Jill said. “My real life wants me back. I can take a cab if you’re too busy to drive all that way.”
“Nonsense. I’m taking you. I’m squeezing every last minute out of this.”
Zack drove her back to her part of the world with the windows down and the oldies playing on the radio. He took her to the auto dealer, where she signed some papers, paid with a credit card, and got her car back. In the parking lot, standing in front of Jill’s newly repaired car, they wrapped their arms around each other.
“I guess this is goodbye,” she said.
“Not yet,” said Zack. “I still don’t have your phone number.”
The words pulled on her, and even though she didn’t want to recognize the reality of her situation, she did. Despite all her daydreaming about taking charge of her life, about hitting her own snooze button, she knew that as soon as she got back to Potomac, she would once again be a secret agent of the Network on assignment. This little side trip with Zack made for a nice vacation, one that she really needed, but what more could it be than that? Zack was innocent, and one day next semester, when Sergio was dead and Jill was long gone, the vampires would be looking for people who might know where to find her.
“Okay, I suppose I can give you my number,” Jill said with a smile.
Zack typed on his phone as Jill recited ten digits. The numbers came out smoothly from her mouth, not at all sounding like the lie they were. She gave Zack her old phone number, one she had given up in middle school.
Zack’s fingers kept typing long after Jill had finished giving the number.
“What are you doing there Mister?” she said. “Writing a novel?”
Zack smiled. “I’m sending you a text,” he said. “That way, you’ll have my number as well.”
“A text? I thought you didn’t like to text.”
“I don’t. But for you I’ll make an exception.” He gave one final push on his screen with his index finger. “It’s sent. You’ll just have to take a look yourself.”
Jill took in two quick breaths through her nose, wondering if Zack’s text would bounce back as undeliverable.
“I had a lot of fun today,” she said. “Last night too.”
“When am I seeing you next?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “My life’s a little bit crazy. Next weekend I…”
Now thoughts of her real life were strangling her like a snake. Brawl in the Fall was last night. The Date Auction was next weekend. Tomorrow morning she’d be back at school doing all the political maneuvering the mission required.
Zack’s phone buzzed. “Hmm,” he said.
“What is it?” said Jill, steeling herself, wondering if his text had bounced and she was about to get caught in a lie.
“Apparently a band who
was playing at the Yorktown Pub in Arlington canceled. My band is getting the gig,” he said. “You should come. It’s Friday night.”
“I’m sorry, this Friday…”
Now the lies were getting harder to come by. What she really wanted to say was I would love to see your band play. What she actually said was, “…this Friday I have to do a dinner with my parents.”
“Okay, call me then,” said Zack.
“Sounds good,” said Jill.
“But if you wait too long I’m calling you. I want to see you again soon.”
“It’s a deal.”
Jill’s mind was on the many things that awaited her when she returned to school. Then Zack kissed her and she forgot it all again. So long as his lips were on hers, she was back in bed, pushing the snooze button all morning long.
Jill plugged her phone into the charger as soon as she started the car, but it wasn’t until she was on the highway, stuck in a massive traffic jam, that her phone had gathered enough power to come back to life.
There were 15 alerts on her screen.
“Good Lord,” she said. “Miss me much?”
She scanned back to the first text that came through last night after her phone had died. It was from Nicky at 9:00.
On my way to Sutter’s Field now. See you there.
Jill could only imagine how Nicky must have felt when she got no response. Nicky probably thought Jill was ignoring her on purpose. It wasn’t far from the truth. At the time Jill took off for Riverwinds, she was of the mind that Nicky Bloom and the whole Network could stuff it. Had she really wanted to be in contact with them, she could have gotten the charger from her car. She very conveniently forgot it overnight and had no way to speak with them.
The line of traffic lurched ahead. Jill stepped off the brake and let her car coast forward a few feet before coming to another stop. She looked at the next message, at 9:22, also from Nicky.
Are you with Annika? She’s not here and she’s not answering her phone.
The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) Page 20