The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four)

by Spencer Baum

  “Oh, okay,” Jill said, turning her gaze to Alvin. “Who else knows about this?”

  “Just the three us for now,” Alvin said. “I know you wanted this in the strictest confidence, and I hesitated to bring in Eve, but our timeline is so short to pull this together, and Eve has gone into a vampire’s mansion undercover before.”

  “I have lots of equipment that will help you pull this off,” Eve said. “Please, come sit with us.”

  As Eve walked Jill up the ramp and to the row where Alvin was sitting, she said, “Some of the most important missions we’ve ever done were mapped out right here in theater 13.”

  “I’m guessing we have some relationship with the owners of the theater,” said Jill.

  Eve nodded. “The same family has been in charge of this theater for forty years, and they are good friends of the Network. Truth be told, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.”

  “This ratty old place would have gone out of business a long time ago if the Network wasn’t propping it up,” Alvin said.

  Eve stepped aside so Jill could enter the row. She went all the way down and sat next to Alvin, who was pointing a remote control at the back of the theater. He pressed a button on the remote and a light came on in the projection booth, then the movie screen lit up with a picture of Daciana’s mansion.

  “I’ve spent the past three months exploring the data you guys stole from Tremblay Property Management last fall,” Alvin said. “Financial records, emails, and most importantly for our purposes, blueprints.”

  He pressed a button on the remote control and the picture on the movie screen changed.

  “Behold, my friends,” Alvin said. “The original blueprint for Daciana Samarin’s house.”

  The picture on the screen was of a hand-drawn document, showing the layout of an enormous mansion.

  “Good lord,” said Eve. “You know what I would have given to have something like this on my last mission?”

  “Thanks to Nicky and Jill,” Alvin said, “every operative who raids a mansion gets a blueprint now. The TPM database has this info for every building the clan owns.”

  Jill allowed her eyes to drift from one corner of the screen to the other, creating a map of Daciana’s mansion in her head. Library, Storage, Servant Quarters, Furnace…

  “We should expect the party to take place in the foyer and the great room,” Eve said. She turned on a laser pointer and aimed it at two large rooms on the blueprint. “When you arrive, you’ll enter through this door. Right here is where you’ll have to check your coat. You won’t be allowed to take your purse or your phone inside the mansion. Daciana has a thing about cell phones. She hates them and will insist that everyone leave theirs at the coat check. Fortunately, you won’t need a phone to take pictures or communicate with us.”

  Eve rushed to a plastic bin that sat on the far aisle of the movie theater. She removed the lid from the bin and pulled out a leather satchel that she brought to Jill. After unsnapping the lid on the satchel, Jill found that it unfolded like a display case. A pair of earrings and a necklace hung inside. There was a brooch clipped to the center.

  “I’ve worn that jewelry to my fair share of cocktail parties,” said Eve. “Why don’t we start with the earrings? Go ahead and put them on.”

  The earrings were large diamond studs. Too large.

  “I’m guessing these are made of glass,” she said.

  “Right you are,” said Eve. “Everywhere you see a gemstone on your jewelry, assume it’s actually a camera lens.”

  Jill put the earrings on. They surprised her with their heft. Next to Jill, Alvin was fiddling with a set of earbuds. When he finally got them untangled, he slipped them on and said, “Test, test. Say something for me, Jill.”

  “Say something? Like what?”

  Alvin looked at Eve and gave her a thumbs up.

  “The microphones are on the earring backs,” Eve said. “While you’re at the party, Alvin will be able to hear everything you say. Put on the necklace now.”

  Jill unhooked the necklace from her case. It was a leather choker with a wirewrapped pendant made of smoky topaz. At the top of the stone, an array of small jewels were set inside the wire. Jill smiled as she looked at those jewels.

  “Am I looking at the camera?” she said.

  “You most certainly are,” said Eve.

  Alvin pushed a button on his remote control, changing the image on the movie screen. Now they were looking at video of Alvin sitting in his chair. As Jill turned to look at the screen, the viewpoint of the video shifted.

  “What about communication? Will you be talking to me?”

  “Top pocket of the center fold on your case,” said Eve. “Open it up and have a look inside.”

  Jill did as Eve instructed. When she got the pocket open, she found a case with two tiny plastic circles inside.

  “You ever worn these before?” Eve said.

  “No, but I know exactly what they are,” said Jill.

  Jill pressed her fingertip to one of the plastic circles, which immediately took hold, then she placed the circle inside her ear.

  “That’s right,” said Eve. “Once you get it in there, just let it slide into place.”

  As Jill let the tiny plastic circle grab onto the skin of her ear canal, Alvin manipulated the screen on his tablet, then whispered to it, saying, “Test, test.”

  Jill heard him as if he was right inside her ear.

  “I can hear you,” she said, “but will I be able to hear you in the mansion? What’s the signal like on these things?”

  “Very strong,” said Alvin. “These use low frequency magnetic induction. You could crawl to the bottom of a cave and I’d still be able to talk to you if you’re in range. Which is good, because Daciana’s crypt is quite literally in the bottom of a cave.”

  “I’ve got a similar case of jewelry to give to Nicky,” Eve said. “Between the two of you, we should get some great surveillance on the mansion.”

  “You haven’t told Nicky about what I’m doing, have you?”

  “Is that not part of the plan?” said Eve.

  “No!” said Jill. “Tell me you haven’t talked to her yet.”

  “Of course not,” said Alvin. “This meeting is our first discussion about it with anyone.”

  “What’s the harm in telling Nicky?” said Eve. “I mean, I believe in need-to-know protocol as much as anyone, but Nicky will be in the mansion with you.”

  “I don’t want Nicky to know what I’m doing,” Jill said forcefully.

  “Is there something we should know?” said Eve. “Is everything alright with Nicky?”

  “Everything’s fine,” said Jill. “Just strictest need-to-know on this one, okay?”

  “I suppose it is a very sensitive mission,” said Eve. “But it would be helpful if Nicky could cover for you when you’re away from the party, don’t you think?”

  “You let me handle that,” said Jill. “Just promise me the others don’t get to know what I’m doing.”

  “We really want to get cameras and microphones on Nicky too,” Alvin said.

  “That’s fine. Give her the gizmos and tell her it’s for reconnaissance. Tell her I have them too. But don’t tell her about my plan. Got it? Just us. Need to know only.”

  “You’re the boss,” said Alvin.

  Jill hated keeping info from the rest of the Network, but on this, she felt she had to. Nicky, Helena, and Phillip weren’t thinking clearly about the mission, and Jill couldn’t risk them derailing her one opportunity to get at the goods she knew were stored in Daciana’s house. The others were so eager to complete the old job, to find some miracle that would put Nicky back in a position to win Coronation, they might not see the potential for this new operation. If even one of them decided they were opposed to Jill’s idea, the whole thing could fall apart.

  She wouldn’t risk it. She had lost her patience with all of them—Nicky, Phillip, Helena, even Ryan—they were all looking at the mission with t
his myopic view about Coronation and Sergio. There was no time to argue with them so she wouldn’t even give them a chance to engage. They would understand when it was over, and they would thank Jill for doing what she had to do. Until then, they didn’t get to be involved.

  “Anyway, the party starts in the foyer,” Eve said. “Make your rounds a few times, make sure everyone’s seen you there, then, after an hour or so, when you’re certain everyone is too drunk to notice, come this way.”

  On the blueprint, Eve pointed at a hallway that connected to the foyer. On one end of the hallway was the kitchen, which was where Jill expected Eve’s laser pointer to go. But it didn’t. Instead, it drifted down to the other end of the hallway.

  “The bathroom?” said Jill. “No, I need to go up through the kitchen to get to the back side of the mansion. I want to go to the crypt.”

  “Of course you do,” said Eve, “but security in the crypt…maybe you should explain, Alvin.”

  “I’ve learned a lot about the security on Daciana’s crypt this week,” Alvin said. “As you might expect, it won’t be easy to get in there.”

  “So why are you sending me to the bathroom?”

  “Because of this,” Alvin said. He pressed a button on his remote and the screen changed. No longer a blueprint of the mansion, the screen now showed a diagram of overlapping electrical circuits. “Over the years, Daciana has done a tremendous amount of remodeling on her mansion, but she’s left the original wiring mostly unchanged. That’s the weakness in her security system that we’re going to exploit.”

  “From the bathroom?” said Jill.

  “From a single power outlet in the bathroom,” Alvin said. “An outlet that is part of a circuit that extends to the floor below.”

  On the diagram, Eve pointed her laser at a square of connecting lines starting on the left end of the screen and going down across the bottom.

  “Daciana’s crypt is a concrete box with walls that are more than a foot thick,” Alvin said. “The only way anybody is getting in and out of there is through the door, and the door has three security measures that make it hard for anyone other than Daciana to open it. The first and oldest bit of security is a locking mechanism on the handle. For decades, that was it, but as the years have passed, and Daciana’s crypt has become strategically more important to the clan, she’s added more security.”

  “An alarm?” Jill said.

  “That’s the second security measure, and I’ll get to that in a moment. The alarm shouldn’t be much trouble for us. The bigger problem is the electromagnet that seals the door closed. The magnet is controlled by a fingerprint reader on the wall near the door. Sadly, we don’t have any of Daciana’s fingerprints, and don’t even know which finger she uses on the reader. But there’s another way to disable the magnet.”

  “Shut off the electricity,” said Jill. She understood now, and was getting excited.

  “That’s right,” said Alvin. “Based on this diagram, I’m confident you can go into the bathroom on the first floor and, from there, overload the circuit that provides power to the crypt.”

  “Nice,” said Jill. “What am I gonna do? Stick a fork in the outlet?”

  Eve smiled. “Something like that,” she said. She went back to her plastic tote and pulled out a small, velvet-covered box, which she handed to Jill.

  “One last piece of jewelry for you to try on,” she said.

  Jill opened the box and found a bracelet inside. A charm bracelet, like the one she and all her friends wore in middle school. As she lifted it from the box, she looked at a few of the charms hanging off of it. A unicorn, a cross, a mushroom—the charms were made of pewter. Dangling loosely from the bracelet, they jingled together as Jill held it up.

  “Seriously?” she said. “You want me to wear this to Daciana’s party? It’s not going to match my outfit at all. People are going to ask about it.”

  “You’ll make it work,” said Eve. “To pull off a job this complex, you’ll need tools, and little bracelet will be your tool belt.”

  Chapter 16

  In the basement-level of Daciana’s mansion, in a crypt made of reinforced concrete and steel, there was a computer. A powerful computer, with state of the art components and tremendous memory and processing speed.

  This computer, Daciana’s personal computer, had a unique level of access to two very important pieces of software.

  The first was Clean Street. Now on version 2.0, Clean Street’s purpose was to allow the clan to “listen” to every conversation in the digital world. Emails, texts, cell phone conversations, chat rooms, and the like—Clean Street sought out traitors by the words they used online, and notified the clan of anyone who might be a threat to their dominance. It was Clean Street that made people frightened to speak ill of the immortals, that made it seem inevitable that if you were engaging in rebellious activity that you would disappear in the night.

  Jill knew this software very well, having combed through her mother’s final draft one harried night, fixing problems her mother was too exhausted to see, and adding her own custom lines of code to the program. Those lines of code, which she named The Marsh Hawk Protocol, allowed the Network’s digital communications to remain invisible to the clan.

  As powerful as Clean Street was, there was another piece of software on Daciana’s computer that interested Jill even more.

  I require a program that will give me unrestricted access to hundreds of bank accounts, in financial institutions across the world, and will allow me to see and control all of them from a single interface.

  That was the first sentence of Daciana’s original proposal for the software, a proposal Jill read one afternoon when she was snooping around on her father’s laptop. The proposal went on to describe in detail how the interface was to be laid out and how Daciana wanted the software to work. When Jill gave a copy of that proposal to the Network, they speculated that Daciana’s intent was to solidify her control over the clan.

  “This is about controlling the bank accounts of all the vampires in America,” was what Gia Rossi had said about the software. “Daciana wants a simple interface where she can get a snapshot view of all the bank accounts of the clan at once.”

  “It’s more than a view,” Jill had replied. “Look at some of the requirements in that proposal. Daciana wants unrestricted access.”

  “Of course she does,” Gia said. “If you control a vampire’s money, you control the vampire.”

  That conversation with Gia happened three years ago, but the memory of it was fresh in Jill’s mind.

  If you control a vampire’s money, you control the vampire.

  Jill thought you could take the logic one step further.

  If you control a vampire’s computer, you control the vampire’s money.

  This was the idea she had presented to Alvin a few days before. This was the idea that brought Jill, Eve, and Alvin to a run-down movie theater in Rockville. This was the reason Jill would stay in town for a little longer, risking her life even though the original mission seemed doomed.

  It was dangerous for them to stay in Washington, and downright reckless for them to walk into Daciana’s mansion. But the potential reward was worth the risk. If Jill could sneak away from the party and find her way into the crypt, she could take control of Daciana’s personal computer.

  And change everything.

  Jill stayed at the movie theater in Rockville with Eve and Alvin all afternoon. She memorized the entire layout of Daciana’s house. She learned about the alarm system in the home, where the control panel was, who manufactured the control panel, and how it could be hacked.

  She became familiar with the charm bracelet Eve had made for her, which was every bit the tool belt Eve described it to be. Breaking into Daciana’s crypt was a multi-step process that would require Jill to override the alarm, trip a circuit breaker, control the security cameras, and even pick an old fashioned lock. All the tools she would need to pull off the job were hidden inside the many pewt
er charms on her bracelet.

  With Eve coaching her on how to move through a vampire’s mansion, and Alvin bringing up screen after screen of detail, they walked through the plan, starting at the moment Jill arrived and finishing when she returned to the party having completed the hack. By the time they finished talking and Jill exited the movie theater, the sun had gone down. When Jill slept that night, she dreamed about blueprints and charm bracelets.

  The next morning she got a phone call from Ryan’s mother, inviting her to join the Jenson family on a short trip to a ski resort in Pennsylvania. She declined, making up an excuse about a commitment with her aunt and uncle in Virginia.

  “Well then, I guess we’ll see you at our Christmas party when we get back,” Suzette said.

  “Yes, I guess you will,” said Jill.

  Later that week, Jill’s parents returned home from their business trip in Seattle. Jill was out walking in the woods when they arrived. By the time she got back in the house, her mother was already upstairs in her office, and her father was at the bar, making a martini.

  “Hey there,” he said to her. “Can I mix something up for you?”

  “No thanks.”

  Walter Wentworth looked tired as he mixed vodka, vermouth, and ice in the steel shaker. His eyes were red. His hair was greasy and matted flat on his head.

  “How was your flight?” Jill said.

  “No problems,” said Walter. “Watched a movie, took a nap, you know how these things go.”

  Jill was a good twenty feet away from him, but still could smell the Bloody Mary mix on his breath.

  It was interesting to look at her father now. In the weeks before Walter and Carolyn had left for Seattle, the power dynamic in the house had shifted dramatically. Jill, having discovered the truth about her mother, had confronted Walter about the slave he had purchased from the Farm and made into his bride. Walter, in turn, had become a blubbering mess, years of guilt and regret pouring out in one awful conversation with his daughter.

  Walter poured his martini into a glass and found his way to an easy chair.