The Con Code

by Shana Silver

  Colin stands so close, and I catch a whiff of the spicy cologne he picked up at a rest stop in Louisville. The group files into the rectangular room where rows of display cases sit on thrones of steel legs. Books rest splayed open in each one. Overhead lights drop spotlights onto the tomes. The students start to spread out, but the tour guide waves everyone toward the first display. The human book.

  “As your camp mate already pointed out”—she lifts her chin toward Lakshmi—“we sent this book to a medical examiner in New York City to determine if the binding comes from traditional sheep leather or from the human skin. Since the test requires examination of DNA and touching the surface could contaminate it, examiners removed a small sliver from the inner flap that had been covered by a glued-down page.”

  “Spoiler alert,” one of the campers shouts. “It’s human.”

  Several students, including Lakshmi, lean in, oohing and aahing at the seemingly morbid artifact. Except, of course, the version on display here is another one of my mom’s excellent forgery achievements.

  Across the way, Colin lifts a phone to his ear. “Hello?” The cue: Natalie calling him to signal she’s ready to be someone else. But also to give him an opportunity to act out his role.

  The tour guide stops talking and glares at him. Her finger lifts to her mouth: Shhh. Abby crosses her arms and stomps toward Colin.

  He slaps at the air, waving her away. “Is she okay?” His face falls.

  Abby stops in her tracks, hovering in front of him. Every head swivels in his direction, including the tour guide’s. Everyone’s except Lakshmi’s. She only has eyes for me.

  “Dad, hold on a sec.” He cups his hand against the phone and peers up at Abby, his face grave. “My—my grandma’s in the hospital.” He lets out a strangled wail. “I need to…” He doesn’t finish, just heads toward the doorway. Abby doesn’t stop him.

  Colin hustles beyond the glass, pressing the phone against his ear and whispering something nobody will ever hear because there’s no one on the other end. He disappears around the corner. While everyone’s preoccupied with Colin’s ruse, Tig starts tapping away on her phone. She’s already done the hard work of hacking into the security systems and planting scripts that will instantly cause every alarm in the building to go off. Once she remotely accesses her laptop, it’ll take a quick second or two to execute the scripts.

  Ugly Dave cranes his neck at the group. “Where’s Natalie?”

  Tig clutches her bladder and points toward the entrance.

  Abby checks her watch. “Still? I’m going to check on her.” She snaps her fingers at both Daves. They perk up to handle the group while she stalks away toward the bathroom, dark hair swinging.

  Shit. And I mean that literally. Time to enact contingency-plan A. I leave my perfect spot in the middle of the group and weave through the other campers, muttering, “Excuse me,” in a rush to cut Abby off at the door. “Abby, wait!”

  Abby stops and spins around, one foot outside the door. She’s still wearing her resting-bitch face, otherwise known as I see right through your bullshit.

  “You should know…” I look around, then lean in conspiratorially toward Abby, making her duck closer to me with a waggle of my fingers. “I think she caught the stomach bug I had the other day. It was pretty awful. She might be in there for a while.”

  Abby’s face pales, but she nods. She slips out of the heavy doors and pulls them shut behind her.

  Rule #15: There are boring parts to being a criminal. Sure, we swoop in and grab expensive jewels right out from under your nose, but in order to do that, we have to plan for everything. Which means risk management: identifying anything that could go wrong and coming up with a plan to mitigate potential dangers. Not exactly glamorous but still necessary. My dad even made me audit a college-level risk management course as part of my criminal training.

  Thankfully, we already accounted for Abby being a nosy beyotch. I picture the scenario unfolding exactly as planned: When Abby enters the restroom, her steps will trigger an iPod rigged to play an audio clip of Natalie saying, “Fiona? Is that you? Can you tell Abby I’m not feeling—” The track then dissolves into heavy moans and the sound of liquid splashing into a toilet basin. Once the door shuts, the trigger resets for the next person to hear just in case someone entered the bathroom before Abby.

  If that doesn’t fool Abby, she’ll duck her head under the locked stall to find scarecrow legs stuffed with doll cotton, wearing the exact same pants and cowboy boots Natalie wore today. Any follow-up questions Abby asks to nonexistent Natalie will be answered in a loop of moans.

  A few seconds after both Colin and Abby leave the room, an announcement comes on the PA system. “Estelle LaMar, please come to the front desk. You have an emergency phone call.”

  The tour guide’s face drops. My stomach squeezes. I force myself to look away, studying the square plaster ceiling tiles above us. This is the worst part of any con. The people who get hurt in the process. Even if it’s just emotionally. Even if it’s just temporary.

  “Dears, please stay put for one minute. I’ll be back in a jiff. Have a look around,” she says, because after all, why wouldn’t she? Everything in this room is under an alarmed glass case. She shuffles out of the room, running as fast as her old hip can take her. Good thing Notre Dame is out of session for the summer, and the library is short staffed.

  When she reaches the front desk, she’ll pick up the phone, and a boy disguising his voice as a man’s will keep her talking as long as possible. Colin will use the info we extracted about her from across the web, mostly in press releases from the library illustrating all the Good Samaritan work she does. He’ll claim he’s calling from her credit card company because there’s been suspicious activity on her account. He’ll list a few of the legit purchases Tig sussed out and then buffer it with outlandish ones. He’ll drag out the process to “close” her account as long as possible. If that starts to fail, as a last resort, he’ll suggest she cancel all her other credit cards right then.

  The heavy doors open a minute later, and “Estelle” comes back, but with some slight adjustments to her appearance. This cosplay version is hunched over more to account for Natalie’s extra inches of height. Her shoes are now trendy Toms instead of the sensible flats she wore two minutes ago. For days Natalie and Tig have been monitoring the employees here by hacking into the security cams to case the place and do recon from afar. And this morning, Tig’s quick hack of the surveillance footage showed us Estelle’s outfit. We cobbled together a replica as best we could in under an hour. The black cardigan we “borrowed” from Lakshmi while she was in the shower fits Natalie a little too tight in the boob area, stretching across her chest instead of being baggy. Natalie-as-Estelle clears her throat. “Sorry about that,” she says in her best impression of an old lady, which sounds too much like Natalie to my own ears, like a concert pianist that skips an entire bar of music but keeps on playing, and only his teacher notices.

  “Is everything okay?” Lakshmi sidles back up to Natalie in disguise.

  My pulse thumps.

  “It’s fine, dearie,” Natalie says. “Just the credit card company.” She straightens and swings her arm too fast, too agile, in the direction of the opposite side of the room. “Now, if everyone will follow me, let’s take a look at this book from the sixteenth century.” She gestures toward the display case at the far end of the room that houses a book about witchcraft, probably written by people who thought there were actual witches back in the day.

  Tig stabs at her phone.

  Instantly, every alarm in the building switches on. A loud wail screeches, and everyone’s hands rise up to cover their ears. A little lightbulb affixed to each alarmed glass case blinks an aggressive red color, and short little whoops ring out, adding to the symphony of sound. The lights in the room switch off, and floodlights spring to life instead, each one blinking.

  “Everyone, please evacuate immediately,” an announcement blares. “This is a
n emergency.”

  Although I can’t see him, Colin and Estelle have most likely hung up—her to evacuate, him to intercept the call from the alarm company, which Tig has routed to his phone instead of the main desk.

  “Everyone!” Natalie shouts. “Please follow me in an orderly fashion.”

  Tig runs out of the room, nearly knocking Natalie aside as she does so, and soon the thunder of student footsteps follow as panic ensues. Sydney screams louder than the alarm and grabs James’s hand with white knuckles. He doesn’t look like he minds. The Daves try their best to calm everyone down but ultimately give up and join the fray of fleeing guests. Only Lakshmi and I remain calm, but Natalie moves over to her.

  “Do you smell smoke? We have to go!” She grabs Lakshmi’s hand, tugging her out of the room so fast that Lakshmi trips and rolls her ankle in the process. Natalie needs to jet out of here as fast as possible in case Estelle decides to come back and check for stragglers rather than evacuating.

  “Ouch! Hold on!” Lakshmi stops in the hallway, rubbing her ankle, but as she bends down, her eyes land on me.

  I pretend not to notice.

  I quickly pull my trusty lock-picking tools from my back pocket. I resist the urge to sigh with nostalgia at all the good times we’ve all had together and make quick work of unlocking the case with a few twists of my tension wrench and Bogota rake. I can’t hear the beautiful little click in all this noise, but the tools slide into place. A little tug and twist and the case pops open.

  In any other circumstance, I’d make sure to be stealthy. I’d be quick as a fox as I lifted the book from beneath my waistband and switched it out with the one under the display. But there’s no point in being stealthy when the FBI knows I’m doing this. I switch the book on display and the replica with a sleight of hand and a lot of prayers.

  CHAPTER 26

  The four of us squeeze into the three-seater at the back of the bus. Lakshmi plops into the row right in front of us and closes her eyes in a ruse that she’s sleeping.

  My head’s still swirling, my muscles locked and on edge, but I force myself to power through the script we wrote and practiced while Lakshmi helped Abby set up for the picnic lunch at the lake.

  I make a grand show of flipping through Mom’s forgery and letting my breathing increase. I desperately want to take my time, scrutinize every page, but I need to concentrate first and foremost on this ruse for Lakshmi. If we succeed in fooling her, there will be plenty of time later to comb over every inch of this thing.

  To play up the ruse, my tongue clucks, and I grow more and more dejected as my eyes blur over everything my mom painstakingly copied.

  “Anything?” Colin prompts.

  I lower my voice to a whisper … but not low enough that Lakshmi won’t be able to hear us. “This one’s not like the others. There’s no clue obviously written in it.”

  “Maybe there’s something already in the text. Something that your mother would know you would recognize,” he suggests, basically saying what the FBI thinks verbatim.

  I make a big, dramatic sigh. “Okay, let me read more closely.”

  Tig silently sets the timer. Twelve minutes twenty-eight seconds. That’s the amount of time we deemed appropriate for me to read closely and find the “clue” hidden beneath the front cover.

  Everything goes excruciatingly slow as the clock ticks down and I keep turning pages for no real reason. I’m too nervous to truly concentrate on finding the real clue. My pulse amps in the process. I’ve always been crap at convincing anyone about anything, and now our entire plan relies on my delivery for the next few minutes.

  Three.

  Two.

  Tig stops the timer before it reads one, and I let out a gasp. “Oh my God!” I say a little too loudly. A few girls two rows ahead spin around, so I deliberately lower my voice. “Tig, can I borrow your lighter?”

  “We can’t use a lighter on the bus.” Natalie chastises me but obviously doesn’t follow through with her concern.

  Tig unearths a lighter from her pocket and hands it over. She doesn’t smoke, of course, but procured said lighter yesterday. She even made a point of flicking it on and off in the hotel room until Lakshmi yelled at her to put it away and Natalie grumbled that pyromania is not a great hobby to adopt.

  I drag my nail across the pages to make a scraping sound. Colin clucks his tongue. “What are you doing? You can’t pull up the lining. That might ruin it!”

  We scripted this out, each of us grabbing lines in order to convey all the exposition so Lakshmi could follow along as much as possible. No doubt the FBI tested the pages, looking for hidden messages, which is why we have to pretend the hidden message is in a place they couldn’t have checked without damaging the book and making me suspect it was tampered with.

  “Trust me. My mom and I used to pass messages to each other this way.” (Not true.) “I thought it was just a fun game at the time, but now I realize…” I pause and swallow hard, just like we practiced. Just like Colin coached me. “She was training me.”

  I lift up the page with as much noise as possible and then hold it to the lighter.

  To make invisible ink, mix a little bit of lemon juice with water and then heat the paper a little to show what was written. I hold a random piece of paper to the flame to give off the right odor.

  “Look! That’s the clue!” I say, staring at nothing but a slight burn mark. While I rustle through the book again to make noise, Colin grabs the burned paper from me and quietly folds it into a neat square, then slides it into his pocket.

  “Okay, so what does that give us?” Colin says. He’s playing the role of recap right now. “We have a few numbers: Forty-seven. One twenty-three. Eleven.” Hopefully, Lakshmi realizes that 123 is the new clue we just found.

  “And then a bunch of words or random combos,” Natalie adds.

  “And a missing one,” I point out. I wait a beat before clucking my tongue. “Maybe the numbers all go together? An address? A date?”

  “Coordinates,” Colin suggests.

  “Okay, hold that thought for a second. Let me try to run the ones that aren’t plain numbers through a decryption tool and see what I get.”

  “Good idea.” Natalie slaps her hand on the book. “Put them in the order that your mom hit up those places. Which was first? Hesiod?”

  “Yep.” I could reveal the order to Lakshmi, but I can’t hand her all the pieces on a silver platter. She needs just enough to figure out the rest herself.

  I normally like to decipher these by hand, using the exact methods my mother taught me. But for now, I type hesiodagd52nd into a few wrong online ciphers—Nihilist, Gray, Beaufort, Autoclave, etc.—so it’s not too obvious I know which is the correct one in case the FBI manages to search through Colin’s phone’s history somehow. I force a huge sigh out to show I’m not getting anywhere.

  “Keep trying,” Natalie coaxes in a warm voice.

  I type again and wait for the results, then sit up a little straighter. “Hold on, I may have something with this cipher.”

  Colin laughs. “L-E-Z-E-X-H-A-N-Z-W-H doesn’t sound like something.” But it should be enough for Lakshmi to figure out we used a Vigenère cipher.

  “I need to run it through a common dictionary attack. One sec.” I copy the new mix of letters into a common dictionary attack cipher and gasp. “Oh my God.”

  Natalie’s eyes widen. “Water? That’s the answer? But it’s so vague…”

  “It’s not. It’s my mom’s way of telling me how to work with the remaining numbers. Forty-seven. One twenty-three. Eleven. And whatever we’re missing.” I turn to Colin. “Maybe these are coordinates for a place near water? Quick, what’s the longitude and latitude of a place near Finch Creek in Washington State?” I rattle off the address from memory.

  Tig pulls up the answer faster than any of us. Her screen shows the coordinates of 47.3400934°N, 123.1176541°W.

  “That’s it!” We picked this because the coordinates contain two numbers
already: eleven and forty-seven. We decided the missing clue from the guitar factory could point to thirty-four somehow, and that leaves the one we just made up: 123.

  We took a risk with this, making up a legit answer even though we have no idea what the real answer might actually be. It’s quite possible the FBI already deciphered it and got something else.

  “Finch Creek?” Natalie clucks her tongue. “How’d you know that?”

  “Because it was the last place my family ever went on vacation. I doubt she’s hiding there, in the woods, but I bet she left me a clue as to how to find her at our old campsite. We marked a tree with our initials and this cool carving she did—if I can find that tree, I can find her.”

  Good luck, FBI. There’s got to be millions of trees surrounding Finch Creek.

  * * *

  I notice the unmarked black car the instant we pull into the hotel lot. There’s another toward the back.

  A guy in plain clothes—jeans and a T-shirt—chats on his cell phone on a bench outside the lobby, and though he’s wearing mirrored sunglasses, his eyes are on us.

  And he’s most likely not alone.

  I nudge Colin in the ribs, and his head swivels so he can look at what I see. His face pales.

  “I thought he promised to keep the agents away?” I whisper.

  He swallows hard. “He did.”

  Shit.

  My pulse beats loud in my ears. Of course they’re not going to let us just walk out of here at 3 a.m. Now that we deciphered the clue, they don’t need us anymore. Even as bait to lure my mom out of hiding. Their guns can do that just fine.

  Which means we can’t wait until 3 a.m. or even another hour. We have to escape right now.

  The sense of urgency running through my veins pulls me to my feet. On wobbly legs, I push my sweaty hair out of my face as I get off the bus and enter the hotel. I wait for the elevator with the throng of campers, the weight of my necklace grounding me like a hot dish of comfort food. When the doors open, I squeeze inside, making sure to twist just right to avoid staring directly at Lakshmi, who stands in the lobby plucking various brochures for places she’s never going to visit. Her fellow agents likely encircle her the moment we’re out of sight. They’ll probably march right up to our room after she debriefs.