The Con Code

by Shana Silver

  “Cute Guy’s here with the evacuees … but he has his arm around another cute guy.”

  I let out a breath. Tension visibly drains from Dad’s shoulders.

  “Too bad. I’ll just have to find a boyfriend on the next heist, then.”

  We get back to work, our pace amping up thanks to Natalie’s scare. Dad plucks each staple out of the woven-linen canvas until the entire painting falls away from the wooden slats that gave it shape.

  I push him out of the way and desperately shine the flashlight along the back of the painting. My body thrums in anticipation. Familiar scratchy handwriting on the canvas catches my eye. My mother’s handwriting.

  Your age when I left, now with the standard term. Paint an inch thick, bugs instead of eyes. You belong on the surface. Or so it seems.

  My heart squeezes, and I hug the painting to my chest. It’s so very much my mother’s voice. This is more valuable to me than money. Another scavenger hunt clue that I hope leads to her whereabouts. My dad’s crew hopes the clue leads to the real versions of the stolen paintings so they can exchange those on the black market for cold hard cash.

  “Not now, honey.” Dad rubs my shoulder. “We’ll decipher it later.”

  I swallow hard, but he’s right. I get to work rolling up my mom’s forgery while Dad spreads my forgery over the wooden slats and secures it in place with a staple gun. Five minutes later, my painting hangs proudly in the hallway, a masterpiece no one will ever attribute to me.

  I head back upstairs to stash the painting in my suitcase and then hide inside the cleaning cart. Dad waltzes outside to announce the gas leak has been contained. Once all the guests start streaming back into the hotel, I slip out of my hiding place, grab my suitcase, and mosey outside with the painting, successfully pulling off one of my greatest heists to date.

  And all before lunch.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dad makes me wait until we’re back in San Francisco, safely ensconced in our historic house, before he lets me start working on deciphering the clue. I sit at the table in our drafty dining room. We recently had the intricate crown molding polished and refurbished in the places it needed a little twenty-first-century love. Dad brags about the renovation process to all his friends even though he has to stay quiet about how he got the cash to fund the work.

  I squint at the clue, trying to make sense. Your age when I left, now with the standard term. Paint an inch thick, bugs instead of eyes. You belong on the surface. Or so it seems. My mind circles around all the possibilities, going over every last memory in case any of it contains the key to cracking her cryptic words. Nothing comes to mind, so I try a cipher.

  My mom’s favorite cipher was Nihilist, which starts with a five-by-five grid that assigns each letter to a two-digit number by cross-checking which row and column the letter falls in. In Nihilist, Is and Js are treated as the same letter since there are only twenty-five boxes.

  Nihilist creates an encryption on top of the grid by replacing each letter with a different one using a key. My mom always used the key of FIONA when I was a kid, so I use that here as well. With the letters switched based on the key, I try to plug in the clue phrase to figure out the code. But her phrase is far too large, and the first part—your age when I left—provides the guide I need to condense the phrase to a more manageable size. The age when my mom left me was ten, so I circle every tenth letter to reduce the clue to wthdiesooe.

  When I cross-check the shortened phrase against the newly created grid, I get this number sequence: 73 68 57 47 35 36 67 68 67 26.

  “But which number is it?” I growl in frustration at the sheet, my heart beating fast. If I can’t solve this, I can’t find my mom. I can’t be whole again.

  Dad leans over my shoulder and points at number 47.

  I look down at the sheet and notice 47 is the fourth number in the sequence.

  “But how? Why?”

  “‘Now with the standard term.’ Don’t you remember government class?” Dad taps his lip. “Well, maybe not. If I recall, you only got a C plus in it last year.”

  I let out a small gasp. Standard term must refer to the standard presidential term, aka four years, aka one of the many lessons my mom sent me via postcards. I rush over to the stack in my room and flip through them until I find the one with random facts about elections. I thought she had just wanted me to know about electoral colleges for my grades, but maybe she was preparing me to decipher this particular clue.

  The electoral college wasn’t the only homework assignment she doled out to me on a regular schedule long after she disappeared, each arriving in an unconventional way. A yearlong tuition paid in full to gymnastics. Postcards with the periodic table on the back, stamped from a different country and containing a single pop-quiz question about chemistry, as if my mother once held a teaching degree. A book about lasers typed and sent via a dedicated email address, one paragraph at a time.

  Even before she disappeared, Mom put more stock in my criminal training than my education. Every day after school I’d forgo homework in favor of art lessons with her, during which she taught me how to replicate the brushstrokes of the masters in intricate detail. Other art students learned the difference between linseed oil and turpentine, but I learned where to find vellum canvas in the same material used in the 1600s. In fifth grade, she pulled me out of school for a weeklong surveillance operation where she tasked me with following an anonymous target of my choosing (a boy from school) and learning everything there was to know about him, from his routines to his breakfast cereal preference. I then used that info to break into his house and leave behind a single rose. It was a practice assignment, after all, not a con. All I had to prove was that I could succeed without being caught.

  And after she left, we found cryptic handwritten scraps of paper with her plans strewn around like a grocery list for a witch’s brew. It’s how we pieced together her trail of forgeries and replaced 75 percent of them so far. Only three left to go and then I hope, hope, hope she’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  With all this info she’s been sending me from wherever she is, I’ve been clinging to a stupid fantasy that maybe she’s my own personal guardian angel, guiding me to be the person she always dreamed I’d be. And when I find her again, I need her to know I became that person.

  Now, my stomach flips with guilt that I let down my mom somehow, that I’m not good enough to be worthy of this quest because I couldn’t crack the code as fast as Dad did. That I couldn’t do it without him. Forty-seven. It’s what my mother wanted me to know. The number should spark a memory. But my mind comes up blank. “Does it ring any bells?”

  Dad purses his lips. “But neither do the others.” We add forty-seven to our growing roster of clues: 11, D5, Hesiod, 2nd, 92.5. We know Hesiod is the author of an ancient Greek poem, but what that has to do with the other numbers, who knows? We do have faith it will come together once we track down the remaining clues. After all, the first cryptic message we found in the house said:

  Find the clues, then find me.

  Dad places his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll find her, though. I promise. Just three more heists to go.”

  Just three. It seems so close, yet so far before I can wrap my arms around her again. They’re the three hardest heists. Save the best for last and whatnot.

  I’ve already started molding a replica of a notorious prop from a ride at the world’s most famous amusement park, painstakingly re-creating the binding of an ancient book, and distressing a famous and well-loved guitar. Still, there’s so much left to do. The Hotel Galvez heist took us months to plan, and there’s a pang in my gut that tells me if we take that long for the other three, we’re going to run out of time.

  I clutch my necklace in my palm, grounding myself by touching the last gift Mom ever gave me. Silver twists into a complicated matrix of swirls, folding over one another to form a circle engulfed in metallic flames. Touching it usually comforts me, but today it transports me back to the moment
that punches me in the gut every time it resurfaces, when I learned my mother had disappeared. Ten-year-old me sat by the front door waiting for her to come home. I stayed there off and on for three days before Dad placed a hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Sorry, kid. She’s gone.”

  “I miss her so much,” I say now. My voice is small, and I feel like I’m ten years old again, needing my mommy.

  “Me too.” Dad plants a delicate kiss on my forehead. But then his face grows serious. “But Fiona. I need to tell you something.”

  The tone of his voice makes my stomach drop. “Oh God. Did something happen to Mom?”

  A million terrible thoughts float into my mind, all ending in the same scenario: cold metal handcuffs slapped around her wrists and a life sentence robbing me of her forever.

  “It’s not about her. Well, I guess it sort of is. Maybe. It’s too coincidental not to be.” He rakes a hand through his black hair. My dad, who can sweet-talk anyone, who can stand in a courtroom and make every single person inside cower in fear, looks terrified.

  I brace myself.

  “I didn’t want to say anything in Texas because I didn’t want you to lose focus, but—” He swallows hard and looks away for a brief second like a coward. “I’ve heard through the grapevine that Ian O’Keefe moved to town this past week, and his son Colin is scheduled to start at your school tomorrow.” He says the words as if they carry the kind of weight that could sink someone to the bottom of the ocean. But the names are meaningless to me.

  I blink at him. “Okay. I’m guessing we aren’t interested in bringing them home-baked muffins to welcome them to the neighborhood?”

  “Mr. O’Keefe recently accepted the job of head of the white-collar branch of the FBI, heading up the Northern California region.”

  “Oh crap.” I sink onto the couch. “You think he’s after Mom?”

  Dad nods. “Or us.”

  “Double oh crap.” My skin goes cold.

  “I don’t want you giving Colin any intel he can take back to his dad. So please be careful around him, okay?”

  “Okay.” But perhaps Colin’s the one that needs to be careful around me.

  * * *

  “So.” Natalie stops at my locker, and I nearly jump from her abrupt approach. I might be just a little too on edge right now, thanks to the news of Colin’s arrival. A deep fake scar that hadn’t been there yesterday and won’t be there tomorrow covers one side of her cheek. A long wig made up of different pastel-colored strands falls in cascading curls down her shoulders. Every day I come to school and have to pick her new appearance out of the crowd, Where’s Waldo?–style. Of course, to adhere to school policy, all her disguises have to be easily removable in the form of wigs instead of prosthetics. They don’t compare to the ones she uses in private with me and my dad’s crew. “Your dad sent me a text to lay low for a bit because of the new guy, but the one thing we’re really good at is not following rules.” She grins. “So, we’re still taking con jobs, right?”

  “Shh.” I dart my head around, sweeping my eyes past the familiar faces roaming the hallway. “Yes, of course, but we need to be as quiet as possible about it.”

  Most freelance criminals would kill (not literally—at least not this criminal) to have the freedom of homeschool. But I love the confinement of high school. It’s the perfect practice environment for small cons, especially at Amberley Academy, where the students’ pockets run deep, and their desire for rebellion runs deeper.

  Natalie and I have a good side hustle helping our classmates pull one over on someone of their choosing for a small fee or favor. We have a few regular customers who use us to provide them with foolproof alibis to rebel against their parents. My kind of people. I’ve also forged front-row concert tickets for a girl in my bio class. We orchestrated fake parent-teacher conferences—with Natalie playing the lead role of teacher—to prevent the parents from meeting with the real teachers and learning less-than-ideal information. We’ve even staged a fire drill to give poor Regina Clemmons time to run home and change after an unfortunate time-of-the-month-meets-white-pants incident.

  As if on cue, one of our regulars, Olivia Rossdale, fluffs her sandy-blond hair and beelines toward Natalie and me, clutching her violin case like a shield. She leans against the beige locker beside me and beams a pageant-worthy smile, complete with Vaseline slicked on her teeth for extra shine (I’m guessing). “Hey!” Her voice is full of cheerleader pep. “I need your help.”

  “Fake hall pass?” I whisper, spinning around to open my locker. She asks for these so often, I have a stack already forged and ready to go tucked beneath a false bottom in my locker. I’ve mastered the art of passing these to her with a quick sleight of hand.

  Olivia shakes her head, curls jangling. She leans in conspiratorially. “This time I need a permission slip from my music teacher.” She does a little tippy-toe ballerina twirl as she looks behind her toward the music room across the way. “For an overnight in two weeks. A concert performance at another school or something. Whatever sounds the most believable.”

  Natalie’s eyes light up. “Where are you really going?”

  Olivia’s cheeks turn pink. “Ski lodge with friends”—she bites her lip—“… and my boyfriend.”

  Natalie raises her brows a few times in succession, and I elbow her in the ribs.

  “Do you have an example of a previous permission slip?” I ask Olivia, still trying to keep my voice as low as possible.

  “I turned in all the previous ones, but…” Olivia scrolls through her glittery phone. “I found a pic online.” She holds up the blurriest photo imaginable of a pink permission slip, the lettering completely illegible.

  I purse my lips and refrain from groaning. “Give me two days.”

  A chuckle resonates from behind me. “Two days? That’s practically an eternity.”

  Spinning around, I narrow my eyes at the annoying smirk attached to the even more annoying boy wearing a scarf knitted by blind orphans (I presume). Thanks to my internet stalking last night, I instantly recognize him as Colin O’Keefe, my new mortal enemy. He pushes his long bangs out of his face and wiggles his eyebrows in a way that indicates he knows something I don’t. And he’s gloating about it.

  “Hi, I’d introduce myself, but something tells me you’re going to wish you hadn’t met me.” He pops a wad of gum in his mouth, completely against school rules, but he doesn’t seem to give a damn.

  Natalie flips him off in lieu of an answer, stealing the move I was about to use. My blood turns to ice. How much did he overhear … and is he planning to divulge what he heard to his father? Not even three minutes into the school day and already I’ve failed my dad’s one request to be careful around the new douchenozzle.

  Still, I can’t let him see me falter. I straighten and do what I do best: recon. “What are you doing here? Besides gloating.”

  Colin peers over my shoulder at the image on Olivia’s phone, and I fumble to hide it behind my back. It’s too late—he’s seen enough and arches one brow at Olivia. “I’ll steal the permission slip for you before the warning bell even rings.” He doesn’t bother lowering his voice.

  My eyes widen. Isn’t he supposed to operate on the other side of the law? I hastily rush out a shhh.

  Colin sidles closer to Olivia, and her cheeks turn even brighter. She ducks her head and bats her eyelashes. I consider poking her to remind her about that boyfriend of hers. “Then all you have to do is type what you want and print it out. No forgery required.” He grins at us with all his teeth.

  Natalie gasps.

  I sputter. My eyes dart throughout the hallway, locating each camera with the precision of an expert thief. I tilt my body at the exact angle needed to shield my lips from surveillance view. “Wait, you’re going to run her con?”

  He strokes his chin with his forefinger and thumb. “I guess you know exactly who I am.” He lifts a brow. “Go ahead, tell my dad. But please note: I know exactly who you are, too.” He winks. Then tur
ns to Natalie and winks as well.

  I cross my arms. “This is my territory. So—”

  “Was. I already know your asking price is one hundred,” he says, then directs his attention toward Olivia. “I’ll do it for fifty.”

  Olivia straightens, clearly intrigued.

  “Will you lower your voice?” I snap, and let out a growl of frustration.

  Colin hits me with a megawatt charming smile before spinning back to Olivia and dropping his voice an infinitesimal amount. “Where does she keep the permission slips?”

  “In her desk. But it’s locked!” Olivia’s voice is equal parts nervous and excited. And definitely not quiet.

  “Not a problem.” He struts toward the music room with the kind of confidence that makes people pay attention. Students part the hallway for him, all of them swiveling their heads at the new guy. Even the overhead lighting appears to be angled just right to shine a spotlight directly over his skin.

  In the doorway, Mrs. Caldwell stands with her arms crossed above her ill-fitting skirt, a permanent scowl etched on her face. “Jasmine, tuck in your shirt!” she yells at a girl whose shirt is actually tucked in, but not well enough apparently. Mrs. Caldwell has a way with the students, and that way is yelling.

  But Colin disarms her with politician-worthy charisma and some magically charming hello that makes her visibly relax. She quickly smooths down her skirt as though she, too, needs to impress the new student. I scuttle closer, only catching snippets of his smooth intro among the din of chatter in the hallway. “New student … personally introduce … interested in the music program.” She leads him inside her classroom, her face beaming, nodding along to his every word.

  I wedge myself just outside the door, close enough to hear a little better, but angled so that Mrs. Caldwell doesn’t spot me. Across the way, Natalie shakes her head at my petty spying, her pastel wig dancing. I ignore her as Colin casually leads Mrs. Caldwell toward her desk, chatting her ear off about the various types of instruments he wants to pursue. “I’ve always loved the idea of playing a piccolo. Took piano lessons for years, but the piccolo, man. I love how such a small object can produce such brilliant sound.” He lets out a long sigh as though he’s imagining wrapping his long fingers around the body and experiencing pure bliss as he presses his lips to the embouchure. Mrs. Caldwell pushes her frizzy bangs out of her eyes as if to see him better.