“Do you trust yourself, Hal?”
Did I trust myself? Could I trust myself, believe in myself, enough to follow my dream of devoting my life to art?
I wasn’t sure.
The look she gave was so intense, so searching, I almost couldn’t hold her stare. “Because I trust you, Hal.”
She waited a beat, completely comfortable with our staring at each other. Then, the second before I had to look away, she took my hand gently in hers. “I trust you completely, Hal.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “I appreciate your trusting me, Valentino.” I was half joking, half serious when I added, “But you should probably put me to the test, you know? See if I’m worthy.”
Amanda took off her glasses, leaned her head back against the seat, and smiled what I had come to think of as her Mona Lisa smile. “Oh, I will, Hal Bennett. I will.”
She’d been telling the truth that day. She had put me to the test.
And I’d failed.
I thought I’d gotten used to my dad traveling all the time, but when I stepped into the house and saw his bag sitting by the doorway, the sense of relief that washed over me made me realize just how much I’d missed him while he was gone.
“Dad?”
“Kitchen.” The house smelled amazing, so his answer was no surprise.
I followed the mouthwatering scent of garlic browning in olive oil to where my dad was standing at the counter, chopping something green and leafy. My mom and my sister and I always tease him for being totally OCD when it comes to cooking—his recipes inevitably involve dicing about ten thousand vegetables into tiny pieces and placing them very carefully into piles that he adds to a sauce over the course of about forty-eight hours. He says he’s not compulsive, that cooking is all about precision. My mom says he should be more relaxed about food preparation, like she is, but Cornelia and I have eaten food she’s cooked, and if you want my honest opinion, when it comes to the kitchen, my mom should relax a little less.
“When’d you get home?” I pulled out the stool by the counter and plopped down to watch him cook. When he was a teenager, he spent his summers as a line cook, so my dad can dice and slice like one of those guys selling knives on infomercials. Watching him is completely hypnotic.
“About an hour ago. How’s it going?”
“Um . . .” How, exactly, was I supposed to answer him? Well, my friend disappeared and my other friends and I are trying to find her and we have reason to believe that she’s being pursued by evil people who want to seriously hurt her.
What I finally settled on didn’t exactly cut to the heart of the matter. “Okay, I guess.” There was an open bag of chips on the counter and I took a handful.
“Okay?” my dad repeated. He didn’t slow his chopping, but something about his inflection gave me the sense he knew there was more to the story.
I swallowed my last chip and took another. My dad let the silence between us grow, but I couldn’t tell if he was trying to make me uncomfortable enough to spill everything or if he didn’t mind the quiet. Like I said before, my dad’s not exactly the most social being on the planet.
Finally, I had to say something. “Amanda’s still missing.”
He nodded and swept a handful of olives off the chopping board and into a bowl to his right, then reached behind himself to turn off the burner under the saucepan with the olive oil and garlic on it. Graceful isn’t a word I’d normally use to describe a guy, but it perfectly captures my dad in the kitchen.
“Yes, Mom told me.” He wiped off the cutting board and dropped a tomato onto it, starting to cut it into squares almost before it hit the wood.
“What else did Mom say?” My mom was never what you’d call a big Amanda fan. In fact, I think she might have almost hated her. My mom’s not exactly square, but her idea of letting it all hang out is casual Friday. She definitely didn’t find Amanda’s changes of clothes and personas charming; she found them disturbing and she thought Amanda was bad news. When she heard Amanda had disappeared, she said, “I’m so sorry that friend of yours went missing; I hope they find her.” What she meant was, I hope they find her and put her in an institution for troubled teens, which is so obviously where she belongs.
Maybe because the answer would have been unrepeatable, my dad didn’t respond to my question. Instead, he said, “It’s worrying.”
“I know!” I hadn’t meant to shout, but it was such a relief to have someone, an adult, think what I thought about Amanda’s disappearance. Not that it was crazy or criminal but that it was something that should elicit worry.
My mom would have jumped on my outburst (Why are you worried? Do you know something you’re not telling me?), but my dad just said, “I want you to be careful.” He paused, put his knife down, and looked at me for a long beat before adding, “Be very, very careful, Hal.”
Was it my imagination or were we talking about something more than Amanda’s disappearance, more than the attack on Mr. Thornhill?
“Dad?” I asked. My voice was a near-whisper. “Dad, do you . . . know something?”
My dad whisked the diced tomato into a bowl and grabbed for another one. He held it for a long minute, studying the bright red fruit as if it held the answer to an important question. Then he looked at me. “I know some things.” He emphasized the difference between my question and his answer.
Okay, I couldn’t tell my mom about Thornhill’s list, but could I tell my dad? Or would he automatically tell Mom?
My dad started chopping his tomato, then stopped. Still looking down at the cutting board, his voice tight, he said, “If I could protect you from every bad thing in the world, I would do that. You know that, right?” He raised his eyes to look at me, and to my amazement, I saw that he was tearing up.
I nodded, too shocked to speak. This was so not like my dad. My mom can start bawling over the idea of me and Cornelia dying of old age someday. But my dad? My dad practically crying about our safety?
Something was definitely going on.
He coughed softly. When he continued, his voice was normal and I wondered if I’d imagined he’d been upset at all. “Well, you’re definitely dealing with a lot. One friend missing, new friends on the scene. I always liked Callie. And I’ve heard good things about Nia.”
Wait, how had we gotten here? He’d been about to tell me something, I was sure of it.
“Dad?” I began.
“Dad, are you still chopping?” It was Cornelia. She came into the kitchen and stood next to my stool.
“Hey!” My dad turned to look at her and said, “Sure you don’t want to help me cook?”
Was it my imagination, or was he purposely avoiding looking at me?
“Pass, Dad. Hal, can I talk to you for a second?” Cornelia’s voice was urgent. Or at least as urgent as Cornelia’s voice gets. My heart skipped a beat. Had she found something? Had she found someone? Suddenly I was just as interested in what my sister knew as in what my dad did. Still, I hesitated. Cornelia was always around. Lately, my dad never was.
“Better see what she wants,” my dad said. It sounded just enough like an order that I got to my feet. Trying to talk to my dad if he doesn’t want to talk is a lost cause. “We’ll eat when your mom gets home,” he called after our retreating backs. A second later I heard him switch on NPR.
“Cornelia, do you ever wonder about Dad’s job?” I asked as we walked through the dining room.
“He’s a consultant for Market Partners Consolidated International. They specialize in coordinating consolidations for international companies that—”
God, she sounded like one of the brochures he sometimes left lying around. “I know what he does,” I said, impatient. “Officially. I’m just wondering if . . . if he does something else, too.”
“Yes,” said Cornelia.
“Yes?” I snapped my head around to stare at her. “Yes he does something else?”
Cornelia’s voice was calm. “Yes, I wonder about it, too.”
“Do y
ou—”
She cut me off. “What I’m about to show you is of a time-sensitive nature. Do you want to see it or not?”
Time-sensitive nature sounded serious. Of course, so was the possibility of our dad’s having some kind of secret life. “What is it?”
“I want to talk to you about Thornhill’s computer.”
Thornhill’s computer. Could she get me access to his files? Because if she could, maybe my screwup with Nia and Callie didn’t have to be permanent. Maybe if I went to them with the infamous list, they’d forgive me for losing Amanda’s box. Maybe everything between us would be the way it was before I basically handed Heidi Bragg all of Amanda’s most precious secrets.
“What? What about Thornhill’s computer? Did you find a way to get onto it?” Without realizing what I was doing, I practically lunged at her.
Something about my hysteria (or perhaps it was my rabid tone of voice) made her stare at me intently with those assessing eyes of hers. She held her hand up to indicate I should take a step back toward something resembling sanity.
I did.
“Are you seriously going to do something to his Facebook account?”
“What?” I remembered our first conversation about it. “No. Cornelia, I was joking. I thought you knew that.”
“Why would I know that?”
Sometimes Cornelia could be so literal it drove me crazy. “Cornelia, we’re in the middle of a major crisis. Our friend is missing. Mr. Thornhill is in a coma and he may have been kidnapped. Do you really think I would take time out to play a practical joke on a man who’s lying somewhere in a hospital bed unconscious?”
Cornelia shrugged. “Well, why did you take time out to joke with me?”
“Cornelia!” I yanked on my hair to keep from screaming.
She was unmoved by my dramatic display of frustration. “We don’t really have time for you to freak out.” She glanced at her watch. “Mom’s going to be home soon.” I knew what she meant—my dad’s not exactly a follow-your-kids-around-and-see-what-they’re-doing kind of parent, but as soon as my mom gets home from work she always comes to find us and say hello and see how our homework is going, etc.
In short, Dad’s being around wasn’t a problem, but if we had any . . . questionable activities, we definitely wanted to engage in them while our mother was safely out of the house.
Cornelia turned and continued on toward the den. Just seeing the filing cabinet where I’d fruitlessly searched for clues made me embarrassed.
She dropped into the rolling desk chair and gestured for me to sit on the sofa. Behind her, the screen saver showed insanely bright tropical fish swimming happy and oblivious through a digital salty paradise.
“What do you know about unilateral computer networks?” she asked.
“Um, nothing?” I offered.
Cornelia paused for a second, like a person translating a speech in her head from one language to another. Then she began to talk. “Okay, with most computer networks, information can flow in both directions.” Cornelia made her hands into fists and held them shoulder-width apart. “I can enter information on this computer”—she wiggled her right fist— “and retrieve it on this one”—she wiggled her left fist. “Or I can enter information on this computer”—she wiggled her left fist—“and retrieve it on this one”—she wiggled her right one.
“I’m actually following this.” I settled into a comfortable position. One of the coolest things about Cornelia is how she can make you think you understand how computers work.
“A unilateral computer network is different,” Cornelia continued after a brief nod to acknowledge my announcement that I am not completely dim-witted. “In a unilateral computer network, information can only travel one way.”
“Uni!” I shouted. “One.”
She ignored my enthusiasm. “Yes, uni indicates a single direction, and a unilateral network is a basic way of protecting a central database that people will be accessing from remote locations.”
Her last sentence made me slightly less confident than I had been a moment ago. “Okay, you’re kind of losing me now.”
Sighing, Cornelia made her explanation even simpler. “Say you’re a business and you want your employees to be able to work at home and send their work to a central computer in the building to be printed. But you don’t want your competition to be able to hack into your mainframe and download your new secret recipe for the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie.” Again, she held her fists apart. “Employee X goes home, types up his PowerPoint presentation here, emails it to the design people here to be made into booklets for tomorrow’s meeting.” She moved one of her fists on each “here.” “But when Competitor Y wants to sneak into your network and get the cookie recipe, he can’t do it because information can only enter the system, not leave it.”
“Got it.”
“Some unilateral networks go the other way. You might want your employees to be able to take information from a central network without being able to download anything to that network, like a virus. Either way, a unilateral system is the first line of defense in a lot of computer networks. Even the CIA and NSA start by creating unilateral systems and build from there.”
“Wait, you know about the CIA’s and NSA’s computer systems?”
Cornelia stared at me but didn’t say anything.
“Sorry,” I said finally, and she continued.
“Endeavor has a unilateral computer network.”
Incredibly enough, I’d gotten so caught up in Cornelia’s explanation of unilateral computer networks that I’d actually forgotten there was a point. When she said the word Endeavor, however, it all came rushing back at me.
“Okay,” I said, my voice as even as I could make it.
“That means that teachers can enter grades into the system from home, but they couldn’t download a kid’s permanent record, for instance.”
“Okay,” I repeated.
“There’s one exception.”
I felt my throat grow dry. Instead of trying to speak, I just nodded.
“One user has switched the direction of the unilateral system.”
I licked my lips with my suddenly parched tongue. “You’re saying there’s one computer that can take information out of Endeavor’s central computer.”
“And that Endeavor’s central computer cannot access,” she added, nodding.
“And that computer belongs to—” I began.
“Mr. Thornhill,” we finished together.
There was a pause as we allowed what she’d discovered to sink in.
“It’s actually not that complicated, what he did,” Cornelia went on. “He basically replaced, or I should say supplemented, the open unilateral system of the network with a closed, reverse unilateral system between his computer and the school’s mainframe.” My head was spinning so fast I missed some of what she said. Something about his computer being an unspecified “hub” with the ability to engage in “data interfacing” with a computer from a remote location.
“The point,” she finished, either because she was done or because she could tell she’d lost me a few miles back, “is that the school recognizes something different about Mr. Thornhill’s computer and will release information to it.”
“So you’re saying if we can get Mr. Thornhill’s laptop, we can get the data he was downloading.” For the first time ever, I was a little disappointed in Cornelia. I mean, you didn’t have to be a computer genius to know that if we had Thornhill’s computer we could have the information on it.
“I’m saying the school computer will release information to any computer it thinks is Mr. Thornhill’s,” Cornelia corrected, and though it took me a second to realize what she was saying, when I finally did, I literally leaped to my feet.
“So if the school’s mainframe thought, say, this”—I pointed at the computer on the desk behind Cornelia— “was Thornhill’s computer . . .”
“Then it would send or resend to it any documents it was aske
d to produce.” And with that, Cornelia spun around and hit a button on the keyboard.
An instant later, I was looking at a familiar computer screen, one I had seen less than a week earlier in the vice principal’s office.
One I had thought I would never be able to see again.
Chapter 14
“There’s a catch,” Cornelia said from the chair beside me.
Michael Zalin . . . the name meant nothing to me. Zoe Costas . . . definitely a kid in our grade. Samara Cole . . . no idea. The list wasn’t alphabetical, and I just skimmed it hoping for a familiar name. Beatrice Rossiter was there. Frieda Levinson. Aha. Some of the names had little paper clip icons next to them; some didn’t. I scrolled down the page. There I was: Henry Bennett. As I went to click on the icon, Cornelia touched the back of my hand to get my attention.
“I said, there’s a catch,” and her tone made it clear she wanted a hundred percent of my attention.
“Sorry. I’m listening.” I made myself turn away from the screen and meet her level gaze.
“The central computer at Endeavor thinks this”—she pointed at the screen in front of us— “is Thornhill’s computer.”
“Right, I got it.” In spite of my attempts to squash it, my impatience was evident.
“So if Thornhill’s actual computer tries to upload any information from the system, the system will know something is wrong.”
I felt a sudden chill. “And what will the system do, exactly, when it realizes something is wrong?”
Cornelia shrugged as casually as if I’d just asked her if she thought it might rain. “I have no idea.”
“What do you mean, you have no idea?”
“I mean I have no idea. It depends on the security he put in place. Maybe he’s set it up so he can simultaneously log on from two computers.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved. “Cool.”
My relief was short-lived.
“Or maybe,” she offered, “as soon as his computer logs on the system will send a virus to both ‘Thornhill’ computers and destroy them.”
I thought of all the places Thornhill’s computer could be. His office, possibly. The police station. With Dr. Joy. Or Frieda’s mysterious “they.”
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