“Remember Ryan, the story is that it was Art’s idea--”
“I know what the story is and don’t worry, you can trust me. I see how you played this. Art gets to pretend it was his idea to crash into Rosalyn and be a rebel bad boy, and you get Art’s money at the Date Auction. Am I right?”
“Yes, that’s pretty much it.”
Ryan laughed. “Oh Nicky—who knew? Who knew you had it in you to come in here and mix everything up like this? That thing with Art was really well played, but how are you gonna keep him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Art’s dad and Kim’s dad are old chums. There’s no way Art’s dad will let this continue. You got Art for the after-party, but come the Date Auction, I’d think he’ll be ready to beg Kim for forgiveness.”
Nicky went back up the stairs and towards the foyer, stopping at the edge of the dining room where she could see Art’s sleeping body.
“I think Art might surprise you,” Nicky said. “He’s ready to spread his wings a little.”
“You’re not…” Ryan’s voice was suddenly more serious. “Are you and Art..?”
“Ryan, I’m going to tell this to you and you alone,” Nicky said. “Whatever you hear about me and Art next week is a lie. Art may come into school tomorrow ready to brag about scoring big with me, but it’s not true. It’s all part of the ruse. I need for everyone to think that, come the Date Auction, Art’s money is going to me. Letting people think Art and I are sleeping together is a way I can do that. But I have never and will never be with Art. I know this contest is all about playing dirty, but there are a few lines I’m not willing to cross.”
There was a pause on the other end, then Ryan said, “I wish it wasn’t like this, Nicky. I’m still thinking about what I said to you last night. I’m still wondering if there’s a way out of this for both of us.”
“There’s no way we’re getting out, Ryan. We have our parts to play and we have to see it through to the end.”
Out in the foyer, Art stirred a little, his arms moving across his body, his eyebrows twitching. He looked like he might be about to wake up, but then he rolled over onto his side and fell back into a deep sleep.
“Can I ask you something, Ryan?” Nicky said.
“Of course you can.”
“This secret that Kim has on you…when all of this is over, will you still--”
“When all of this is over, Kim will have no reason to blackmail me anymore. What she’s doing is all about getting as much of my money as she can. Now that the Masquerade is over, her strategy is to crush you so thoroughly at the Date Auction that no one would dare think of you as a possible winner ever again, and she wants my money to do that. Right now, she’s talking with my parents about how much money they can set aside for me to bid on her.”
“And whatever they decide?”
“Whatever they decide is what I’ll do. Here’s where I’m at on all of this, Nicky. I could give a rat’s ass who wins this contest. I just know who I don’t want to lose. I’m hoping that maybe if I put Kim over at the Date Auction in a big way, she won’t mind so much if next semester I use some other funds to make sure you don’t end up in last place. And then, when it’s all over, and Kim is a new immortal and you’re still standing, I want for you and me to start over. I want to know the real Nicky Bloom, not the dressed-up version you play for the Coronation contest, but the real thing.”
Nicky didn’t say anything. Still looking at Art asleep in the other room, a part of her wished she could run out the door right now and tell Ryan to meet her on the highway.
But she’d been through all of that last night. No matter which way she looked at it, there was no future for her with Ryan. And that was before she’d learned the truth about what happened to her father and Frankie. Before Melissa told her that Frankie was still alive.
She pulled out a chair from the dining room table and took a seat. “Enough of this depressing talk,” she said. “Tell me more about Kim’s party. I like hearing how sucky it was.”
Ryan laughed, and it made Nicky forget all the many things she had on her mind.
“Yeah, so then word was spreading that you had Art, and people were realizing what a coup that was for you. Funny thing about Art – I don’t think most people gave him a second thought. Everybody’s always known he’s got money, but I don’t think they ever considered that his money could be used on anyone other than Kim.”
“Kim didn’t consider it either.”
“And then you got Annika. That was the most exciting news of the night when I heard that she was missing. Apparently she sent everyone a text.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Annika’s now infamous text, ghostwritten by Jill. Nicky still hadn’t read it, but people were talking about it at the after-party. Mattie declared it to be “the statement of the revolution.” Jenny said it made her cry.
“Well let me tell you, when everyone realized that Annika’s group was at your party rather than Kim’s…that was what really turned some heads,” Ryan said. “I can name at least twenty people who wished they had gone to your party instead.”
“Would you?” Nicky said. “I’ll get a pen and write them down.”
“How about we do it later? I should get back to this shindig with our friend Kim. You can only poop for so long before people start to wonder if something’s wrong with you.”
“Ha! Remember, flush a toilet somewhere in your house before you go back.”
“I remember. Hey, thanks for talking to me. It’s been fun.”
“Anytime, Ryan.”
She ended the call and sat in the chair for a minute, thinking about Ryan. Nicky Bloom the character was supposed to court Ryan Jenson during the first week of school, get him so interested in her that he’d consider throwing his wealth her way for the Coronation contest. To play that role, she had flirted with Ryan from the moment she arrived at Thorndike. She worked her way into a lunch date with him right away. That date went well so they had another. Then another. She pretended to fall for him.
Now, sitting in the dining room of Art’s mansion, the phone still warm in her hand, Nicky wondered if she was losing track of where her character ended and her real self began. She feared that the girl who pretended to fall for Ryan last week might have fallen for real.
Footsteps from the other side of the foyer broke her train of thought. Jill approached from down the hall, stopping for a minute to look at Art’s sleeping body, like an inspector looking at a corpse.
“He’s rolled over,” she announced.
“He’s fine,” Nicky said. “I’ve been sitting here for a long time. He’s totally asleep.”
Jill grabbed one of his hands and lifted it away from his body, then let it drop again.
“He does seem pretty out of it,” she said. Apparently satisfied with her examination, Jill left Art in the foyer and came into the dining room. “We’re in. The entire contents of Tremblay Property Management are being copied to Alvin’s server in Colorado.”
“Outstanding,” Nicky said. “You realize you’ve just completed the single greatest hack in the history of the world, don’t you?”
“It’s not completed yet,” Jill said. “The hardest part of this job is getting the data out in a way that no one will know it’s ever been taken. I used the Marsh Hawk Protocol to make a tunnel to the Internet. From there, the data is getting broken up into three hundred streams that are bounced all over the world and put back together in Colorado. It’s a slow way to do it, but it should keep the entire operation invisible from all the spying eyes out there.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Nicky said. “When do we get to see the data?”
Jill held up her phone, which had a scanned drawing of an electrical diagram on its screen. “I can see it right now,” she said. “As long as the tunnel is open, I have live access.” Now the excitement was welling up in Jill. Nicky could see it. Jill had been containing her emotions, keeping an even keel so she could
concentrate on her work, but the work was almost done and she couldn’t contain her joy.
“What’s that picture on your phone?” Nicky asked.
“A schematic for the rewiring of Daciana’s mansion two years ago,” Jill said. She let out a little giggle. “Can you believe this? I can’t believe this. The info we’ve got…this could change everything.”
“Really nice work, my friend,” Nicky said.
“Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Do you think I’m getting ahead of myself?”
Nicky shrugged.
“I need to keep it together until the job’s totally finished,” Jill said. “Alvin’s going to call me when the data is back together at his end. It should take about twenty more minutes before we know if it worked.”
“What about on your phone?” Nicky asked. “Who cares if Alvin has it? It’s right there.”
“This is a live feed,” Jill said. “We’ll lose access to this when we log Art out for the night.”
“That’s cool,” Nicky said. “Can I…?” She was about to ask if she could see the phone, but she thought better of it. She was itching to get a look at the blueprints for Renata’s mansion, to start a rescue operation for Frankie right away, but now wasn’t the time.
“Can I show you something?” Nicky said.
“Sure. What have you got?”
“Come with me. I picked the lock on a door near the garage and found something interesting on the other side.”
Chapter 6
Jill ran to the numeric keypad on the wall like a child to a merry-go-round. When she got there, she stroked the keys with her fingertips.
Then she began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Nicky asked.
“It’s Merv Tremblay. He’s such a fool!”
“Well, I’d agree with you on that, but I still don’t see why you’re laughing.”
“This giant steel door, this keypad on the wall, the way he tried to hide it in the house—he went to so much trouble to protect whatever is behind this door, probably spent a fortune, but then he sabotaged the whole investment.”
“How? What are you talking about?”
Jill pulled her phone from her pocket and began swiping screens back and forth at a blistering pace. In the darkness of the hallway, her motions created a strobe light effect.
“I took a quick look at a few documents from every file path when I was putting the data tunnel together,” Jill said. “And in one of Merv’s directories he put a document that…here it is.”
Jill held up her phone for Nicky to see. Nicky leaned in close. The screen had a listing of random words and numbers. Rosie123, S0n0fR3ginald2, MortalImmortal, 031487.
“What is all that?” Nicky asked.
“A major slip-up on Merv’s part,” said Jill. “Hubris on an epic scale. A man so blinded by his own arrogance he can’t bring himself to believe that the normal rules apply to him.”
“Jill, please tell me what you’re talking about.”
“For all his wealth, for all the sophisticated technology built into his business, for all his power, Merv is just another old man who can’t use a computer,” said Jill. “He was so certain that his servers would never get cracked that he kept track of his usernames and passwords on an unencrypted document on his desktop. And I bet you this six-digit string of numbers is the code to the door. “
Jill went to the keypad and typed in 0-3-1-4-8-7. The keypad let out a single beep and the door slid open.
“You’re just on fire tonight, aren’t you?” Nicky said.
Jill turned back to Nicky with a wry grin on her face.
“Let’s see what Merv wanted to hide so bad, shall we?” Jill said.
The door opened to total darkness. Jill used the illumination from her phone to find a light switch. When she flipped it, three rows of dark purple lights lit up on the floor, giving the room a misty glow, and creating silhouettes all along the wall.
“Are these statues?” Jill said, approaching one of the silhouettes.
Nicky found another bank of light switches on the wall. She flipped them all and the overhead lights came to life. When the lights showed them what those silhouettes along the walls really were, Jill jumped back in surprise.
“Nicky, what the hell is this?” Jill said, her voice shaking as she spoke.
“It’s disgusting is what it is,” said Nicky.
The silhouettes they had seen along the walls weren’t statues, at least not in any normal sense. They were people. Real people frozen in various states of repose. Three along one wall, two in the far corner, and one…
“Oh my God,” Jill whispered. “I think I’m gonna hurl.”
Jill and Nicky were looking in the same place. On the far wall, directly across from the desk where Merv apparently came down here to sit and work, was a young man’s head, protruding from a wooden plaque on the wall, just like the giant moose in the foyer.
“They’re stuffed,” Nicky said. “The sick, twisted freak stuffs them like all his other hunting trophies.”
There were four men and three women, all of them apparently young and beautiful when Merv killed them. They were naked, their bodies frozen in action stances. Only the young man on the wall was incomplete. The rest stood in various action poses. A girl with blonde hair was frozen in a full-on sprint, as if she had just started a race. A young man with dark skin and blue eyes was twisted at the waist, like a football player looking back for a pass, or a victim turning back to see his attacker.
Nicky touched the arm of a short girl with curly brown hair. It was rubbery and cold.
“What is he..” Jill began. “Why? Why is he doing this?”
“Because he’s sick in the head,” Nicky said. “He pays Melissa and Dominic to give him rejects from the Farm. One time Gia and I watched it happen. We were hiding in a tree, spying on the Farm in the middle of the night, and Merv showed up with two other people. Melissa sells a portion of her slaves so people like Merv can take them out to the middle of nowhere and hunt them down. He wants so bad to be immortal he’s crossed over into crazytown.”
“I wanna get out of here.” Jill said. “This place is making me sick.”
“Wait a second,” Nicky said. She approached the desk at the other end of the room. “I want to see what else is in here. With a room like this…”
The desk had two banks of drawers, one on either side. Nicky opened the bottom drawer and reached inside, pulling out a gold chain necklace with a huge diamond pendant. She held the necklace up in the light. “Why do you suppose this is here?”
“Sheesh,” Jill said. “It’s probably worth a million plus. Look at that diamond. I expect Merv’s storing it down here because he thinks this room is safer than any deposit box.”
Nicky turned the necklace around in her hand. The gold chain was woven in a thick, Byzantine design with some heft to it. The diamond was set in the center of a gold medallion. On one side of the medallion was an engraved picture of a rose. On the other was the letter W inside a shield.
“Come have a look at this,” she said to Jill.
Jill looked down at the floor as she walked past the naked bodies on either side. When she got to the necklace and saw the shield insignia on the pendant, she almost dropped it, catching the chain just before the piece crashed onto the desk.
“What in the…this is my family crest,” she said.
“Look on the other side,” Nicky said.
Jill flipped the medallion over. “The Borgia Rose,” she whispered. “My great, great grandmother was a Borgia. This was from my grandparents’ wedding. The Borgias wore their dowries on their wedding days. This would have been it.”
“If this necklace belongs to your family, why does Merv have it?” Nicky asked.
Jill shook her head. “I’ve got half a mind to take this,” she said.
“Now, now…I don’t blame you Jill, but--”
“Oh relax, I’m not really gonna take it, but come on. Don’t you think this is weird
that Merv was hiding this necklace in his desk?”
“Everything about this room is weird,” said Nicky. “Let’s take some pictures of the necklace and put it back.”
Jill placed the necklace down on the desk and Nicky used her phone to take pictures of both sides. She put the necklace away and opened the next drawer in the desk, where she found a stack of papers. They went through the papers one at a time, taking a photo of each. There was an invoice from the Garrion Company for the installation of the steel door, minutes from a meeting of the TPM board of directors, and a stack of birth certificates, Social Security cards, and passports.
“Looks like Merv has a couple extra identities handy,” Nicky said.
“They all do,” said Jill. “Every billionaire in Washington started scrambling for extra ID’s after what happened to the Evans family. Even if you’re in good with the immortals, you never know when you might have to sneak away in the night.”
“Merv’s done pretty well for himself with these,” Nicky said, pulling out bank statements assigned to each phony name. “He can go to New Zealand as Terrance Yves, or Switzerland as Christoph Hammerstein, or Canada as Gregory Mimeux, and each of them has his own bank account ready to roll.”
Jill shook her head. “I was going through my dad’s phony ID’s last month—the dummy keeps all of them in the drawer of his nightstand, right underneath a gun he probably doesn’t know how to use. His ID’s are for the exact same countries. He has passports from New Zealand, Switzerland, and Canada.”
“You think they got these together?” Nicky asked.
“I have no idea what they did,” said Jill, “but the fact that Merv also has a necklace that belongs to my family--”
“It seems like too many connections to be a coincidence,” said Nicky.
Jill nodded. “What’s really weird is my dad and Merv don’t hang out much. They’re friendly with each other at parties and stuff, but all this makes me think there’s something we don’t know.”
The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) Page 5
