“No explosives?”
“No explosives. Nobody gets injured. This is going to be a clean hit. Cibix won’t even know it’s happened until you’re long gone.”
“And you’re confident that I’m going to break into a high-profile company, within a high-profile city, and wreck high-profile servers, all without getting caught?”
“Or so the plan goes.”
“What happens once we land in New York?”
“This airplane is scheduled to land in New York in four hours.” He glanced at his laptop to confirm the time. “Tonight is easy, we simply check into the Hilton down the street from Cibix headquarters. Tomorrow, we strike.” He gave me a satisfied smile and then he raised his headphones to his ears and returned his attention back to his laptop.
I pivoted towards the window to look out over the Atlantic as my stomach banded into knots. I never wanted to return to America until every last potential trace of my secret was gone. Now I was in a position where the only way to make sure my secret stayed hidden was to go to America and destroy Cibix’s research. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
I closed my eyes and told myself to think soothing thoughts. The first soothing thought that popped into my head was Ben. Then I remembered I had told him I would call him as soon as I got back to Paris. That was looking longer now, so I would have to reschedule our date. I pulled out my phone and looked up the number for the hospital, and when the ER receptionist picked up I asked her to page Ben.
“Alice? Is everything okay?” Ben panted when he came on the line.
“Yeah, Ben, everything is fine.”
“I got nervous when the front desk said I had an urgent call from a girl named Alice. I thought you were hurt.”
“I’m not hurt or anything. I just didn’t have any other phone number for you and I figured I could catch you on shift at the hospital. I just wanted to tell you that our date needs postponing because a new flight just got added to the schedule. Yours truly was selected to be the peanut pusher.”
“Oh. That’s fine, Alice. If duty calls, what can you do? I would hate to think of all those hungry passengers going without peanuts just so I could enjoy you. Let me know as soon as you get home, alright?”
“I promise you I will. I’ve got to go now, drink service is about to begin and if I’m not quick about claiming a refreshment cart I’ll get stuck with the one with squeaky wheels.”
“Oh wait, Alice?”
“Yes?”
“May I ask what rabid jungle they are flying you off to now?”
“Actually, it’s a concrete jungle. New York City.”
“Sounds lovely.” I heard the crackle of a name being paged over the hospital intercom in the background. “That’s for me, gotta go. See you soon, Alice.”
Chapter Eleven: The Big Apple
THE GLITTERING BLOOM of New York City was blinding from behind the glass of the egg-shaped airplane window at my cheek. Everything down below looked so neon compared to Paris. When the plane touched the tarmac at JFK, I felt a stab of dread run through my body.
Motley had a rental car waiting for us in the airport parking lot with the keys resting on the driver’s seat. Rabbit got behind the wheel and drove us into Manhattan, where we checked into our room at the Hilton.
I rolled my suitcase across the airy lobby, towards the row of elevators that led up and down from the penthouse suites. I rooted my finger to my chin and turned to Rabbit.
“Rabbit?”
“Yes, Alice?”
“I couldn’t help but notice that the concierge only handed you one room key. Were you planning to slum it on the bench beneath the baby grand piano in the lobby tonight?”
“No, Alice, we’re sharing a room. Motley wants us completely connected the whole trip.”
I let my bags drop from my hands onto the floor like boulders. “I don’t think so. I demand my own room.”
“Alice,” Rabbit gritted out, “you’re making a scene. A girl on mission to subvert the efforts of the United States Government should not throw a tantrum in public.”
I knew he was right, so I hooked my hand back into the handles of my bags and huffed out a, “Fine.”
“Our room is on the seventh floor.” He thumbed the elevator button.
“Listen,” I said. From the shiny silver doors, our blurry reflections looked back at us as though from the surface of a murky mirrored lake. We were just a couple of kids staring back. I was wearing too much makeup and Rabbit still had traces of acne. “You need to understand that I haven’t forgiven you for snitching on me to Motley.”
“We need to put that aside for right now, Alice. There are bigger fish to fry. I just hope we can trust you on this job.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I hope Pressley Connard doesn’t show up again and convince you to tie tongues with him instead of properly destroying the Cibix servers.”
The elevator chimed and the doors opened, sliding our reflections away. “That is so ridiculous, Rabbit,” I said, stepping inside, spinning like a dervish. “And you should be one to talk about indiscretions, taking every opportunity to get touchy feely with that stray geisha girl at Etienne’s masquerade party like you’re some kind of nerdy playboy.”
“Alice, forget about our feelings for the time being. We need to put our bickering aside for this job and just focus on getting it done.” After the elevator let us off on the seventh floor, we hoofed it to the room without another word.
“After you,” I told Rabbit when reached the door. “Since you have the key. Since you always seem to have the key to every place we go. I guess that’s how being the favorite works.”
“You just don’t quit, do you, Alice?” He slid the cardkey into the door and pushed it open. I stormed inside and noted that the room was spacious, neat, and it had a fully stocked mini bar. I plopped my bags on the floor and got to unscrewing bottle caps. I carried an armful of bottles and an ice bucket into the bathroom with me and filled the tub for a bath. After I had been inside the bathroom with the door closed for a half-hour, Rabbit knocked. “Alice?”
“What do you want?” My voice reverberated against the tiles in the bath stall, and I realized that I had slurred my words.
“Please don’t get sloppy drunk and pass out in there. We can’t do the mission against Project Nine tomorrow if you’ve drowned. If you’re hung over it’s probably all gonna go to pot too.”
“I’m relaxing,” I shouted back. “What do you want from me?”
“We really need to do some planning tonight.”
“Door’s open.”
Rabbit pushed his way into the steamy bathroom and his mouth dropped open. “My gosh, Alice, it must be two-hundred degrees in that water. And your skin’s as pink as a devil’s. Is that an empty champagne bottle floating next to you in the tub?”
I tugged the shower curtain shut. “Mind your eyes.”
I heard him drop the lid on the toilet and sit down. “We really need to prepare for tomorrow.”
“What was in your hand when you walked in?”
“These,” Rabbit said, fanning a stack of papers, “are the building blueprints for the Cibix world headquarters building on Avenue of the Americas.”
“So we’re really going to storm the headquarters like you said on the plane?”
“No, Alice, we aren’t. Just you.”
“Of course,” I said, sarcastically, as I leaned back to let my hair dunk into the water. “Let me guess? You will get to monitor my every move during the job from a safe distance?”
“I’ll be supervising, yes. Right now I am working on planning your route for tomorrow.”
“How the heck am I going to storm through a highly-secured corporate office undetected?”
“Most major corporations have servers that do an automatic save-and-refresh routine when user traffic is low. This is usually between two o’clock and three o’clock A.M., when most employees, even the most dedicated, are sleeping an
d not checking their email or accessing databases. The backup-and-refresh period is when servers are most vulnerable.”
“Are we going to break into the building during that quiet window while the Project Nine servers are down?’
“Nope. We aren’t going to break in at all. You’re reporting for work as a Cibix employee in the morning.”
I picked up the empty wine bottle that was floating around in the tub and blew into it like a conch. “Funny, I don’t remember submitting a résumé.”
“I am going to exploit the vulnerable window in the middle of the night to hack into the system and manipulate a new employee profile for you. This will allow you to move freely inside the building tomorrow.”
“Don’t you think the people at Cibix will catch on once nobody remembers hiring me?”
“Cibix has fifteen-hundred employees that report to their headquarters, in addition to another six thousand worldwide, so being an unfamiliar face won’t automatically make you suspicious.” His eyes followed the soapy trail from the empty wine bottle back to me in the tub. “As long as you don’t do something that draws attention and makes you look suspicious.”
“What?” I asked incredulously. But I knew what. I was floating alongside an empty wine bottle in a smoldering tub the night before our most daring job yet.
“Just try and sober up and get some sleep tonight.”
Once Rabbit got up and left, I got out of the tub, toweled off, and padded to my bed. The hot bath and bottle of wine made it easy to fall asleep. Liquid sedation was the only way I was able to fall asleep, since I was full of anxiety over being back in America.
* * *
The walls rattled. My eyes flew open. The fuzzy-flowered Thomas Kinkade painting hanging in a heavy oak frame above my bed teetered on its balance.
Rabbit slammed the door shut behind him on his way back in the room, jarring me awake, the world spinning behind my sleepy eyes. By the time I remembered where I was, Rabbit was standing over me with a huge, double-handled Bergdorf’s bag dangling from his skinny fingers.
“I have a little gift for you, Alice.”
I popped up in bed and grabbed the air for the bag like it was catnip. Once I had it in my grasp, I tore it open, only to be disappointed when I pulled out a black two-piece business suit. “A drab black suit? Yuck. If you want to motivate me out of this bed, you’re going to need to do better.” I sunk back under the covers. Outside the window, sounds funneled up from the streets below, and I could hear a car alarm going off and the sound of rain drumming against the building. The hotel room was full of crisp air-conditioned air.
“That suit is perfect for where you’re going today, Alice.”
“Should I assume this frumpy undertaker’s outfit is the Cibix standard uniform?”
“We have to keep things nice and bland for the office today. It’s called being professional.”
I slid down off the bed and stepped over the crumpled Bergdorf’s bag on my way to the kitchenette, where I brewed strong coffee, which I mixed with what little liquor was left from the mini bar. “See,” I began to pontificate, “this is why I don’t work in corporate America. We have a much freer dress code in our line of work.” I chugged the coffee and dumped the empty cup in the sink. There were complimentary little wrapped sticky buns so I ate them before hitting the shower. When I was done, I styled my hair conservatively and applied a light coat of makeup. I called out to Rabbit through the door sliver, “Can you pass me the suit?”
“Here.” The bag pushed through the door.
I snatched it from his hands and quickly got dressed and stepped out of the bathroom. “I’m ready to be briefed,” I announced.
“Have a seat and I will brief you on today’s job.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and leaned into Rabbit, who was sitting on a plush arm chair that was pushed next to the window. “What’s with all this?” I noticed that Rabbit was holding a stack of odd objects in his hands. “Did you rob a spy shop or something?”
“Here is your employee badge.” He handed me a laminated plastic badge. “It has a built-in key fob to open all standard access doors within Cibix HQ, plus it is programmed for extra access according to your department.”
“Did you go out and print this badge this morning? I knew you left too early for Bergdorf’s to be open.” I was spinning the badge in front of my nose to get a look. It had my photo paired with the name, Debra Light, with a caption underneath that read, Finance Department. “Oh geez, Rabbit, did you have to go and make me a boring accountant?”
“Accounting is the most believable department for our purposes. I played around with the Cibix human resources database, and, as of today there is a Debra Light, Junior Account, level II, Funds and Accounting for Research and Development.”
I screwed up my face. “Translation por favor.”
“Basically that means you allot the gimme money to the researchers on new programs. Including Project Nine. That will give you access to the server room for Project Nine, you know, in case you need to check up on how the allotted money is helping the software engineers’ progress.”
“I can’t believe you made me a bean counter,” I grumbled.
Rabbit handed me a steno pad, a blue ballpoint pen, and some legitimate looking spread sheets. He explained these would help me look like I was in the middle of something important so that people wouldn’t stop me in the halls and try to make chitchat. I shoved the Bic behind my ear, straightened my shoulders, and did my best to look like a bookish accountant crushed under the giant hamster wheel of corporate America.
“So what do you think? Do I look the part?” I asked, proudly jutting my shoulders. “Do I look like some office bimbo named Debra Light?”
Rabbit pursed his lips so that they resembled a balloon knot. “Alice, what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. Why are you looking at me like that?” He was looking at me like I was a freak.
“Geez, Alice. You messed with your hair again. I told you to quit dyeing it before it all falls out or something.”
“Rabbit, what the heck are you talking about? I didn’t touch my hair. It’s exactly the same as it was when I woke up this morning.”
“You added a blue streak. I can see it.”
“Blue? Rabbit you are seriously developing a blood clot on your eye from staring at computer screens all day because I did not dye my hair blue.”
“Alice. Listen to me very carefully. Your hair is blue.”
I shot up from the bed and ran to the bathroom mirror. I let out an awful gasp when I saw my reflection. Rabbit was right. There was a blue skunky streak among my front strands of hair. I reached behind my ear and pulled out the pen and saw that the tubular clear plastic spine of it was dripping vines of blue ink. “Great, my stupid pen exploded. Now how am I going to fit in with corporate America?”
Rabbit leaned into the doorway, the thin, gawky profile of his chin waning like a crescent moon behind my reflection in the mirror. “We just have to go forward, Alice. There’s no time to fix it. Maybe nobody will notice.”
I dropped the pen into the sink, letting the ink seep contagiously over everything, and stormed to the bed. “What else do I need to know for the mission?”
Rabbit reached into his pocket and pulled out a small earpiece. “This.”
“What’s that? Some kind of bug?”
“This is a listening device. It’s how I will communicate to you. You will pop it in your ear and listen for my directions, since I will have blueprints to the building while I do surveillance from the car. The codename for it is June bug.”
“So far my hair is blue and this mission stinks, so I’m renaming it the Stink bug.” I popped the newly named Stink bug into my ear. “How does it work?”
“I will be able to communicate directions to you, and if you need to talk to me, it can pick up sounds on your end too.”
“Now only one thing remains for me to know, and that is how the heck I am supposed to de
stroy the servers once I’m inside.”
“Ah,” Rabbit said brightly. He dropped down to his knees beside the bed and carefully slid out a black briefcase from underneath. “I was hoping you would ask.”
“What’s in the briefcase?”
He drummed his fingers over the briefcase and announced, “A very sophisticated acid solution that will destroy anything it comes into contact with.” He popped open the briefcase and showed me a set of silver flasks that contained the highly dangerous acid that I would be using to evaporate the information on the servers. “Don’t mess around with these, Alice. Don’t breathe it in and don’t get it on your skin. This has to be a clean mission or you will be hurting.”
“I don’t need a safety lecture. I’m not a freaking two-year-old. Plus, I am the girl who mastered climbing down the Eiffel Tower. I think I can handle myself.”
“You only climbed down part of the way. And I realize you’re not a two-year-old, but this is serious stuff, and you had trouble handling a ballpoint ink pen without incident.”
“You really get a kick out of making me look bad, don’t you?”
“Listen, we need to get a move on this. Employees usually start piling into Cibix by eight A.M. and it’s getting close.”
“One more question.”
“What?”
“Walking down to the server room to check it out might not attract attention since the badge makes me official, but I’m pretty sure Cibix has security cameras positioned on something as valuable as the Project Nine servers. How am I going to splash the servers with acid without security seeing and rushing to detain me?”
“I managed to find a route to hack the security camera circuits in the building. I am going to freeze the picture on the cameras inside the server room so that your activity doesn’t get captured.”
I cuffed my fingers around the briefcase handle and we made our way down to the lobby and outside to the parking garage attached to the Hilton. We hopped into our rental car and Rabbit glided us into the congested morning traffic. It was raining, and large aqua raindrops settled on the windshield like glassine jewels.
Generation of Liars Page 13
