The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) (37 page)

“You and I need to have a talk, Nicky Bloom,” she said.

“About what?”

“Lots of things. Don’t worry. Sergio has already cleared you and your family of wrong-doing. I just want to know who you are, and where you came from.”

“I’m from Chicago,” Nicky said.

“Oh yeah, what part?”

And then they were off, spending the next hour talking about Nicky’s past. Daciana learned that Nicky’s father was a commodities speculator, and that Nicky applied to Thorndike as a long shot, but felt good about her chances after the student interview.
She learned all about the first semester from Nicky’s point of view, the contest, starting with the Masquerade, and going through the Date Auction.

“We were supposed to spend a week together in Italy,” Nicky said. “But we were abducted at the airport.”

“Tell me about it,” Daciana said.

“Three black vans drove out on the runway
. When they opened the door, I saw a metal cannister fly into the airplane. There was white gas hissing out of it.”

“I bet you had some pre
tty trippy dreams, didn’t you?”

“The worst,” said Nicky. “It seemed like they would never end. But they did. Eventually, I woke up on an airplane with Ryan. The two of us were bound for America.”

Daciana quizzed her about the details, and was satisfied with Nicky’s answers. There was nothing to learn about Renata from this girl. She and the Jenson boy had both been in an Addonox-induced slumber during their entire captivity.

“You seem like a strong girl, Nicky Bloom
,” she said. “For some people, the dreams you get on that knockout gas are too much, and it sounds like you were knocked out for a long time. A weaker woman might never recover.”

Nicky shrugged her shoulders.
Daciana liked this girl.

There was a buzz inside Daciana’s jacket.

“Ugh, these infernal things,” she said. “I usually don’t carry mine around, but…excuse me for a second.” Daciana reached into her coat pocket. She pulled out her phone, struggled with it for a second, then shook her head in disgust.

Another text message from an unknown number about a verification code.

“Take a look at this for me, will you?” she said, thrusting the phone at Nicky. “I keep getting these messages. What are they? Have you ever seen something like this before?”

Nicky took the
phone and looked at the screen. She stared at it carefully for a few seconds, then she handed the phone back to Daciana and said, “I don’t know. It kind of looks like spam.”

“Yes, I fear that’s what it is. How do I make it stop?”

“With these things, I find it’s best to just let them run their course,” Nicky said. “A lot of them are phishing operations.”

“Fishing?”

“They want you to respond. Once you do, they get to work on you, trying to steal something from you, or get to do a survey, or just generally be annoying.”

“Asinine,” Daciana said. “These so-called smart phones aren’t smart in the slightest, and I have half a mind
to get rid of mine altogether.”

“I bet you the messages stop,” Nicky said. “Just ignore them.”

“I intend to. When I get back home, I intend to set this telephone in a closet and ignore everything about it! Speaking of which, I suppose we should get back to the school. My driver is still waiting for me outside the chapel and I’ve got a long list of things to do tonight. Mind if I drive again?”

“Please, be my guest.”

“It came from an unknown number, and said your verification code is three-three-eight-four-eight-one.”

Jill was sitting in her bedroom when she heard Nicky say the words. It was Sunday morning. Nicky had called her after what sounded like a crazy adventure with Daciana the night before.

“Repeat that code for me again,” Jill said.

Nicky repeated the numbers. This time, Jill wrote them down as Nicky said them.

3 3 8 4 8 1.

“Six digits,” Jill said quietly. “I’ll be damned.”

“I told her it was spam and she believed me,” Nicky said. “Daciana’s a little slow on the uptake when it comes to technology. I think smart phones confuse her.”

“It’s not spam,” Jill said. She fired up her computer and logged into the
Network server.

“Then what is it?” said Nicky.

“It’s a two-step verification,” Jill said. “God! I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming! And you’re sure Daciana doesn’t know what the message means?”

“She handed me the phone and asked me what I thought of it,” said Nicky. “She’s been getting those messages all week and wanted to make sure someone wasn’t putting malware on her phone or something.”

“Well, no, not her phone,” Jill said. “But she’s right to be suspicious. I’m so mad at myself about this. We’re really lucky that Daciana is so clueless about her phone.”

“So you’re the reas
on she’s getting these messages?” Nicky said.

“Yep.”

Jill was navigating through the Network server to get back to the open session she had on Daciana’s computer. When she got there, she found the same screen she had left the night before. Daciana’s banking software; Jill’s attempt to get it open thwarted by a pop-up window asking for a six-digit verification code.

“About what time was it when Daciana showed you the message?”

“It was getting close to two in the morning when that happened,” said Nicky.

Jill looked at the time stamp on her pop-up window. 1:54.

“I can’t believe this,” said Jill. She let out a little laugh. “I’ve been sending her text messages all week!”

“Is it when you’re trying to log in on her system?”

“Yes,” said Jill. “My mom pushed out an update on this software last year when Daciana was gone. I found emails about it on my dad’s computer. My dad told Daciana they had improved security on the banking software and needed to train her how to use it. That must be when Mom added two-step verification.”

“So this verification sends a code to her phone when you try to log in?”

“That’s right. God bless my mother. Daciana wanted this software to be bulletproof, and my mom did just that. I couldn’t log in because I needed Daciana’s phone.”

“But you have the code now, right?” said Nicky.

“We’ll see,” said Jill. “Here I go.”

She looked at the numbers she had written down and began entering them in the pop-up window.

3-3-8-4-8-1.

“Here we go,” she said, clicking the submit button.

Session has timed out and verification code has expired. Please enter new verification code.

“Dammit!” Jill said.

“What happened?” said Nicky.

“Too much time has passed since this code was generated, and now I’ve just sent a new code to Daciana’s phone.”

“It might be good if you quit sending her texts,” Nicky said.

“I don’t know if it’s going to matter,” said Jill. “At some point, Daciana’s going to want to use this banking software. When she does, she’s going to realize how it works. That, or she’ll finally do the training on the latest software update that my dad asked her to do eight months ago!”

“And when that happens?” said Nicky.

“When that happens, she’ll realize she’s been hacked,” said Jill.

“Is there anything on the computer that can trace the hack back to you?”

“Of course not,” said Jill. “But I guarantee you, once she realizes it’s happened, she’s calling my mom and making her fix it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the Network will lose access to
Daciana’s computer any day now. I need to tell Alvin.”

She got off the phone with Nicky, called Alvin, and explained the situation.

“We’ve already done a full scan of the machine,” Alvin said to her. “Since then, we’ve just been watching
Clean Street
to see what we learn. Really, the big thing we’re going to lose when this hack gets cut is the potential to steal the money.”

“So basically we’ve got nothing,” said Jill. “All that planning and work to spring me loose from the party, and we’ve got nothing.”

“Not much that we didn’t already have from the TPM database,” Alvin said. “Daciana had a few documents stored on her local machine, but yeah, the big prize here was those bank accounts.”

“
Those bank accounts were a bust,” said Jill.

*****

Her computer hack having failed to accomplish anything meaningful, over the next few days, Jill turned her attention to the Coronation contest. She had a master list of names and numbers saved in an encrypted spreadsheet on her computer. The list began with the four girls wearing black.

Samantha Kwan – 98

Nicky Bloom – 77

Kim Renwick - ?

Mary Torrance - ?

Now that everyone understood how the game worked,
Jill didn’t expect Kim or Mary to give up their numbers, but she intended to figure out what they were by process of elimination. Hence, the rest of the list.

Jill Wentworth – 52

Ryan Jenson – 60

Mattie Dupree – 13

Jake Castillo – 28

And on and on…so many numbers to collect, so many people to talk to.

Samantha’s core group had confessed their numbers to Jill, and there were sixteen people Daciana had called to the stage, but beyond that, Jill was looking at a long list of blanks.

There was so much work to do.

She started with an email to Alvin, asking for all the video footage from Daciana’s party.
I need to see and hear everything you captured in the cameras and microphones Nicky and I were wearing that night
, the email said. Within the hour, Alvin sent her a link and she was reliving the party from Nicky’s point of view.

By the end of the night, she had added twenty numbers to her list. People betting big on the roulette wheel;
people screaming out their numbers at keno; people announcing their lucky numbers before throwing the dice.

Sadly, Kim and Mary weren’t among those people. Their numbers remained blank on her spreadsheet.

The next morning Ryan arrived at Jill’s house and took her to school in the Lamborghini.

“I need you to drop me off on the south end of campus this morning,”
Jill said.

“But the bell’s going to ring in like five minutes,” said Ryan.

“So I’ll be a little late to first period. Big deal.”

“What do you want to do on the south end of campus?”

“I want to go into the chapel and look at the safe.”

Ryan dropped her off at the front door of the chapel. Jill went inside. The safe was still in its spot, on display with armed guards standing on all sides of it.

But the globe full of Ping-Pong balls was nowhere to be found.

Jill left through the front door of the chapel and started walking towards north campus for her first period class. As she walked, she sent a text to Nicky.

Last night when you found Daciana admiring your car outside the chapel, did she have the Ping-Pong balls with her?

Nicky’s return text arrived a few seconds later.

No. I watched her exit the chapel through the back door with the Ping-Pong balls under her arm, but when she came outside, she didn’t have them anymore.

“Interesting,” Jill said quietly. She sent a quick thank you to Nicky,
then opened a new text to Alvin.

I need you to get into the TPM database and look up the layout of the chapel. There is a door behind the altar. Students aren’t allowed back there. I need to know where it leads.

Got it. Will get back to you when I know something,
Alvin replied.

Jill’s morning classes came and went. She paid little mind to what her teachers were saying. Freed from obsessing about Daciana’s computer, Jill allowed her thoughts to dance around the problem of Coronation and the numbers game that would open the safe. By the time lunch rolled around, she had a plan.

She and Ryan met up with Samantha’s group in a private dining room at the Tumbler. After a bit of small talk, Jill turned the conversation towards strategy, and how to open the safe.

“Since we have one of the girls wearing black here with us,” Jill said to them, “we know one number of the combination.”

“Actually, we don’t,” said Jenny. “You’ve insisted that Samantha keep her number a secret, even from us.”

“Samantha’s number is thirteen,” Jill said.