The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three)

by Baum, Spencer

  “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.”

  Chapter 44

  “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.”

  “But that’s it, Mom! That’s the piece we’re missing! We keep telling each other this is the strangest encryption we’ve ever seen, but we haven’t stopped to think about why it is so strange. We should have realized that it makes absolutely no sense to have a constantly changing encryption code on a device like a phone whose very purpose is to share data with others.”

  “I’m not terribly interested in Renata’s motivations, Jill.”

  “But we should be! Don’t you get it, Mom? We are talking about a phone, a device of communication! If the encryption string is always changing, you can’t communicate with anyone! Every voicemail you send, every text, every email—it would all be encrypted with a
string the other party wouldn’t have. They wouldn’t be able to decode it. No one would ever hear what you’re trying to say to them!”

  “Well, yes, I suppose that’s the case. Unless somehow they were sharing the software that creates the encryption. But I’ve looked for that already. Renata’s phone isn’t sending those kinds of strings to anyone.”

  “She doesn’t have to send them. She and Falkon are meeting online and creating the encryption codes together.”

  “Meeting? What are you talking about Jill? Where are they meeting?”

  “The activity log for Renata’s phone,” Jill said. “Not the encrypted part, but the decoy. What kind of stuff is she doing on the decoy phone she set up to fool us?”

  “She’s doing all the normal things you do with your phone,” said Carolyn. “I’ve looked through all of this, Jill. There is nothing suspicious. She sends texts and emails. She has phone conversations. She plays games.”

  “What kind of games, Mom?”

  “She seems to prefer chess.”

  “The other night you told me that only a few capital letters were ever appearing in the encryption. What were they again?”

  “B, R, N, Q, and K,” Carolyn rattled off.

  “Bishop, rook, knight, queen, and king,” Jill said.

  “What? But the other letters. The numbers?”

  “Come with me, Mom.”

  Jill grabbed her mom by the hand and dragged her down the hall.

  “Where are you taking me?” Carolyn shrieked.

  “To your bedroom. I want you to have a look at your quilt.”

  “At my quilt?”

  “Yes, Mom,” Jill said as they arrived in the bedroom. Jill left her mom at the foot of the bed and walked around the side. “Imagine this is a chessboard,” she said. “If you wanted to record the moves of a game, say, if you were a computer program that needed to keep track of who moved which pieces where, how would you do it?”

  “Well, I’d turn the board into a grid, I suppose,” said Carolyn. “You could assign a unique identity to each square based on its row and column…”

  And then it clicked. Jill saw it in her eyes.

  “A through H, one through eight,” Carolyn whispered.

  Jill ran her fingers along the top of the quilt. “If you moved your queen to the square in row E, column eight--”

  “The computer would record Q-e-8,” Carolyn said.

  “And if you needed to share a constantly evolving encryption string with someone else--”

  “You would meet them online and play chess,” said Carolyn. “Let’s get to work.”

  For all the weeks of constant annoyance she provided Jill, for all the nagging, the strange hours, the rude, exhausting diatribes about focus and discipline, for all the utterly strange behavior that was the hallmark of Carolyn Wentworth not only since Tarin freed her mind, but for as long as Jill had known her, it was still an absolute joy for Jill to watch her mother work.

  Once Carolyn knew exactly what it was she had to do, there was no one better. Carolyn’s fingers soared across the keyboard so fast Jill could hardly read the code as she composed it onscreen. Layers of complex algorithms, nested one atop another, and never once did Carolyn make a mistake, or even a typo.

  In less than an hour, she had written a program that followed Renata’s chess game online, wrote down the moves of the pieces in a constantly evolving log of letters and numbers, and used that log to decode the hidden partition in Renata’s phone.

  Carolyn loaded her program onto the laptop, ran it, and they were in. The sound of Renata’s voice came streaming through the speakers on the laptop. On the screen were the words Phone Call With Falkon Dillinger.

  So you’re telling me the girl erased everything? came Renata’s voice.

  “Everything,” said Falkon. “Sergio let her out, she broke into the computer stack--”

  “How the hell did she break into the computer stack?”

  “She knew the code. I don’t know how she could possibly know the code, but then again, I don’t know how she knew to do any of what she did. She was completely ready for us.”

  “Almost like they planned it,” Renata said. “Do you think she and Sergio planned it?”

  “If they did, it would be the boldest, strangest plan I’ve ever heard of.”

  “So what now? How do we get the data back?”

  “We don’t,” said Falkon. “The way she erased it cut to the core of our operation. She didn’t just erase our data, she wiped out the entire computer system.”

  “She needs to bring it back,” Renata said. “Make her talk and get her to bring it back!”

  “I’ve tried! She cannot do it! The routine she ran is irreversible.”

  “So what are you telling me? We’re just screwed? We have to start over at square one?”

  “We have the research file you found on the Farm,” Falkon said. “It was the data from that research, compiled on top of the genetic sequence we had already mapped, that would have built us an immortal. Dr. Weiss had the computers at work on that very project when Nicky destroyed them!”

  “So you still have the file?”

  “Yes, what we need is the genetic sequence. Nicky destroyed the copy we made here. But there should be another copy at the Evans home in Rio de Janeiro.”

  “The other thumb drive!” Renata said. “The necklace!”

  “It will be stored in their safe,” Falkon said. “I’m certain it’s still there. Melissa wouldn’t have known to look for it.”

  “You’re telling me I’m going to Rio.”

  “I would do it myself, but Sergio is still lurking out in the woods,” said Falkon. “I can sense him out there. I need to go take care of him before he causes me more trouble.”

  Jill’s hands were shaking with excitement as she listened. “Sergio?” she whispered. “I need to be writing this down.” She reached for a pad of paper and a pencil.

  “I still can’t believe he had the gall to show up,” said Renata.

  “He is a very sensitive creature,” Falkon said. “He was drawn here because he cares about Nicky.”

  “And where is Nicky? You didn’t kill her, did you? In order to get the money--”

  “I understand how your precious Rose Ransom game works,” Falkon said. “Believe me, it is only the promise of that money that is keeping Nicky alive after what she’s done. I’ve put her to sleep and locked her up. I cannot wait for the moment when I can put her on a plane and get her out of my house!”

  “I’ll get the plane ready and leave for Rio tonight,” Renata said. “Call me when you’ve killed Sergio. I can’t wait to hear that he’s dead.”

  “Expect to hear from me soon,” Falkon said.

  The call ended and the phone went silent. Jill and her mother looked at each other, hardly able to believe what had just happened.

  “That was good, wasn’t it?” Carolyn said. “That was the sort of conversation she was trying to hide, right?”

  “Yes,” said Jill. “That was big. That told us a lot.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “First I need to get in touch with Annika. She needs to know that Renata’s coming to Rio.”

  “And what about Tarin? When do we get to show him what we’ve done?”

  Exhausted and emotionally drained, Jill found enough energy to smile at her mother. It was cute that she wanted Tarin’s approval.

  “There’s no telling when we’ll see Tarin next, Mom. For now, we’re on our own.”

  Chapter 45

  “Frankie, I need you!”

  Her voice, once so pleasant to his ears, now had overtones that grated on Frankie. He came to her not because he wanted to, but only because he had to.

  “Yes, Master. What may I do for you?” he said.

  “I have urgent business to tend to overseas,” said Renata. “Please make arrangements for my immediate departure to Rio de Janeiro. I want my jet in the air before sunup.”

  “Yes, Master.
”

  Frankie rushed off to speak to the scheduler, who in turn made arrangements at the airport. Frankie packed a suitcase for Renata with all her usual amenities, and he chose four ripe slaves to go on the trip so she would have plenty to eat.

  It pained Frankie, the real Frankie, to do all this. It pained him because he wasn’t in control. It was Frankie the slave who did everything Renata asked. The real Frankie, the one who tasted freedom that night in the forest, was trapped inside his own body once again.

  I must kill everyone before they kill me—that had been the rallying cry of the Frankie who nearly got out that night. That, and the new command he placed there himself: I look out for Nicky and she looks out for me.

  Something marvelous happened that night in the woods, something Frankie wished would happen again. For a very short time, just long enough to know it was real, Frankie was free. As he ran through the forest, hatchet in hand and half a dozen people trying to kill him, he was making his own decisions. He was choosing where to go, what to do, and how to do it.

  Then Renata said his name and Frankie the slave came back. But when Frankie the slave returned, he found himself more crowded for space. For years, the real Frankie had been pushed down so deep he had no choice but to observe while Frankie the slave ran the show. After that night in the woods, the real Frankie was closer to the surface.

  One time he even broke out.

  They were in Renata’s gallery on the night of the party. Renata asked him to go to the closet and fetch her shoes. One of the party guests was hiding in that closet. A girl. She looked nice. She had her back pressed against the wall and was begging Frankie with her eyes not to give her away.

  Frankie the slave knew that girl wasn’t supposed to be there. Frankie the slave wanted to tell Renata immediately about what he found.

  But the real Frankie saw the look in that girl’s eyes and felt for her. The real Frankie took pity on her. Even as Frankie the slave screamed that Renata must know about this, the real Frankie seized control and he stepped away from the closet saying nothing.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to win control ever since. Frankie the slave was too powerful.

  “There’s a stack of paperwork on my desk,” Renata told him. “Get that too, will you Frankie? I want to look at it while I’m on the plane.”