Homecoming Masquerade, The (5 page)

J
ill’s first dance was with
Terry Reese who, in the larger scheme of things, wasn’t that important.

The Network had classified the
students of Thorndike’s senior class by the estimated wealth of their families.
In that classification, Terry Reese ended up in the bottom tier, the families
whose net worth was measured in ten million dollar increments. Terry’s father,
an investment banker, was worth twenty million at the most, making him wealthy
enough to hang with the uber-rich, but below the poverty line at Thorndike.

Sitting in that bottom tier with
Terry were about twenty other non-players, people who got the invite to
Thorndike because their families were legacy graduates, or because the
admissions committee saw potential in the kids even if the parents weren’t
terribly rich.

The next tier up was the hundred
millionaires, where the children of politicians and corporate bigwigs resided.
This tier included all the people who served as Kim Renwick’s lackeys, like
Pauline Wabash, Rosalyn Smith, Andrea Peterson, and Brian Kingsbury. It also
included most of the people the Network had identified as possible targets for
Jill and Nicky’s subterfuge. Vince Weir, Mattie Dupree, Jenny Young, Lonnie
Best, Sam Featherstone, and most importantly, Annika Fleming—these were people
whose net worth was large enough to be relevant, but not so large that the
Renwicks were all over them.

The tier above them belonged to
the billionaires. This was a smaller tier, and the one in which Jill’s family
resided. Thorndike ensured that no child of a billionaire was left behind, but
even still, there were only so many billionaires in the world, and this tier
was always an exclusive club. Occupying this space with Jill were Mary
Torrance, Montgomery Oppenheimer, Veronica Gregg, and Richard Nguyen. In this
tier, you were either committed to a Coronation candidate or you were one.
Veronica and Richard were supporters of Kim. Mary had her own candidacy.
Montgomery came from a family that owed the Renwicks a favor.

And then there was Jill.

Kim Renwick had taken Jill’s
support as a given until tonight. Jill’s father had lunch with Galen Renwick from
time to time, and Jill’s family was the sort that didn’t make waves. The little
lie Jill had told her friends about her parents being part of a consortium that
supported Nicky Bloom was certain to cause major waves in DC by tomorrow.

If you blab, I’ll deny
everything I’ve just told you.

That line from Jill’s story
about the consortium was crucial, and served as fair warning to her friends.
Even as she admonished them all not to say a word, she was counting on at least
a couple of them spilling their guts before the night was over. There was
simply too much excitement and too much wine for people like Mattie Dupree and
Jenny Young to keep quiet.

And by tomorrow, when all of
Washington was abuzz about Nicky Bloom and the “secret consortium” behind her
entry, a consortium whose only known members were the Wentworths, Jill would
have to deal with the fallout. She’d have to deny she ever said anything about
a secret consortium, even as she insisted with Annika and the rest that the
consortium was real. She’d have to tell her father that she never said a word,
that someone was playing with them. She might even have to speak with the
Renwicks.

It was about to get very
interesting.

She and Terry made the turn on
the far wall as they rounded the dance floor. She was glad that Terry didn’t
want to talk. She had a lot to work through in her mind. Just thinking about
the can of worms she had opened was making her shiver, and she had to remind
herself that this was what she wanted. Adventure, intrigue, and the knowledge
that she was fighting the good fight.

When Jill enrolled at Thorndike
as a new freshman, she knew that something wasn’t right with the world, and
that her parents might be a part of it, but she never imagined that two short
years later she would be an agent of the Network, actively working to overthrow
the established order.

The Wentworth family fortune
started in the 19th century in the tobacco business, and then exploded in the
20th when Jill’s great, great grandfather bought a ranch in Western Virginia
that was dripping in oil.

By the time Jill’s father was of
age to receive his inheritance, the fortune was large enough that no one in the
family had to work. But Jill’s father, Walter, worked anyway. He started a
software company, and asked his new wife to be the first employee.

His new wife, Carolyn, was only
nineteen when they met and got married, twenty when she started writing
computer code for her husband’s company, and twenty-one when she became
pregnant with Jill.

The Wentworth family company was
called Black Dart Enterprises. It provided “classified software and security
solutions.” It sold a single product: a software suite called
Clean Street
.
It had a single customer: the United States government. It made Walter
Wentworth a billionaire, and it bought Walter Wentworth a close friendship with
Daciana Samarin, the most powerful immortal on earth.

Rich, well-mannered, talented,
useful: this was how the immortals viewed the Wentworths. Carolyn Wentworth was
widely viewed as the most talented programmer in the world, and her
Clean
Street
software allowed the immortals to stay ahead of their enemies.
Clean
Street
had become ubiquitous, its code freely flowing throughout the entire
digital realm. The software read every word that was written on the Internet.
It listened to every phone call. It was embedded in satellite signals, bank
transactions, text messages—it was in the full-body scanners at the airport and
the x-ray machines at customs. It connected together all the many surveillance
devices the government put in offices and homes, it made sense of millions of
hours of conversation, and reported it all to the government.
Clean Street
identified enemies of the state so they could be found and removed. It was
Walter’s favorite child, and Carolyn’s obsession.

Their daughter Jill was just an
afterthought.

Her mother obsessed with work,
her father obsessed with being fabulous, Jill grew up not really knowing either
of her parents. Not that she didn’t try, especially with her mother. When she
was little, Jill sat in the second story office of their mansion in Brandywine,
Virginia while her mother worked. She wasn’t allowed to talk, but she stayed in
the room anyway, listening to her mother’s fingers clatter on the keyboard. She
drew pictures while her mother typed. She looked out the window while her
mother thought.

An old growth forest surrounded
the Wentworth family mansion. From inside her mother’s office, little Jill used
to gaze into that forest, looking for activity, taking particular interest in a
family of hawks that lived in a nearby tree.

On some afternoons, the hawks
would glide above and around the house for hours, waiting for prey to show up
on the ground below and swooping to the earth in breathtaking displays of
strength and speed. Jill imagined that the rabbits and field mice in the
surrounding forest were actually little gremlins trying to attack the Wentworth
mansion, and the hawks were their only protection. She came to think of the
hawks as her pets, even though she never stood within ten feet of one.

Noticing that Jill had lots to
say about the birds in the forest, the nanny bought Jill a pair of binoculars
and a field guide, tools that allowed Jill to identify the majestic birds as
Northern Harriers, also known as Marsh Hawks.

With binoculars and field guide
in hand, Jill spent spring and summer outdoors, tracking those hawks. She went
on daily expeditions to find them. She learned to distinguish the males, whose
feathers were white on the underside, from the females, who were totally brown.
She gave names to every hawk she saw, and learned the distinct markings and
behavior of each one. She even found a nest with five eggs under one of the
bushes that served to mark the southern edge of the Wentworth property.

When Jill was nine, her father
hosted the software buyers from the Pentagon at the house for a weekend retreat
of sorts. One of the men wore a hairpiece that was obvious even to Jill’s
inexperienced eye. At the end of the weekend, Jill’s father took his guests for
a walk in the woods and one of the hawks decided it wanted the man’s hairpiece.
Maybe it thought the hairpiece was a rodent, or it would go nice in the nest.
Whatever the reason, the hawk swooped low, took the hairpiece away, and left a
gash on the man’s scalp.

The following day, Jill’s dad
hired a specialist to come and drive all the hawks away and place special
netting on every tree to ensure they never returned.

Jill never forgave her dad for
removing the hawks, but she did move on. Her forest friends removed, Jill’s fascination
with nature eventually gave way to a genetically inevitable fascination with
computers. Her mother had written
Clean Street
, after all.

Strangely, it was at age 10,
itself a combination of one and zero, that Jill’s brain seemed to open up to a
natural understanding of binary logic. Nested command structures,
object-oriented analysis, compilation, execution – Jill began to see the world
as inputs, algorithms, and outputs. At age eleven, she coded a video game from
scratch. At age twelve, she hacked into her school’s mainframe, and fiddled
with her grades and attendance records.

When she was fourteen, and a
freshman at Thorndike, Jill briefly stepped away from the keyboard to indulge
an interest in Ryan Jenson, but that didn’t go very well, and she went back to
her computer.

At age fifteen Jill found
herself disillusioned, lonely, and bored, so she wrote a program that
intercepted the cell phone data of her classmates, streaming their phone calls
and text messages onto the computer screen in her bedroom. For one dreary,
depressing night, she eavesdropped on all the personal conversations of her
classmates. She didn’t like what she saw. Backstabbing, lying, nastiness, a
total lack of authenticity – her peers at Thorndike reminded Jill of her father,
and sent her looking for something different. Something that wasn’t totally
fake. Careful to hide her virtual tracks, Jill began wandering the dark alleys
of the Internet, making contact with people who gave her passwords to the
encrypted message boards and chat rooms where forbidden topics were discussed.

She found herself reading posts
from people who named themselves
Bloodsucker Nightmare
and
VanHelsingXX
,
people who spoke openly about their hatred for the immortals, and their longing
for a revolution. At first, the posts shocked her, sometimes to the point of
turning off the computer and swearing she would never go back to those
forbidden sites again.

But she couldn’t stay away. It
was the truth of it all, the war between good and evil that was playing out in
the world, and the fact that Jill and her family were on the wrong side – it
made her come back. When she went to the chat rooms, Jill was doing right by
the world, atoning for the sin of being a Wentworth, if only for a few minutes.
She knew she was risking her life every time she logged on, but was confident
in her own ability to remain hidden from the many spiders and bots looking for
troublemakers like her.

Jill observed as people traded
information on suspected locations of the farms where slaves were grown, and
read the desperate pleas for help from people whose loved ones were stolen away
in the night. She read about the Network, the secret organization whose goal
was to overthrow the immortals, and fantasized about being a part of it. She adopted
her own handle in this secret world, coming to be known as
Marsh Hawk
.

Marsh Hawk
quickly earned
a reputation as someone in the know. Her stolen data stream at Thorndike was
useful for getting more than just school gossip. Thorndike students were the
children of politicians, lobbyists, and corporate titans. Paying close
attention and reading between the lines, Jill used the stolen text messages and
phone calls to infer whose stock was rising on Capitol Hill and whose was
falling, who was slipping the goods to which politicians and who was about to
get squashed. The virtual gossip at Thorndike, so boring and disheartening to
Jill at first, turned out to be more informative than any news service or web
site. She came to understand the importance of information, of “intel” as they
called it in the chat rooms, and Jill was happy to have something to contribute
to the cause, however small.

While she fantasized about being
one of those Network agents who went undercover to get close to the immortals,
who stormed the mansions to take on the vampires and free the slaves, Jill
never actually imagined herself being anything more than a snoop at her school.
All that changed the winter of Jill’s junior year, when her mom was late on the
“deliverables” for version 2.0 of
Clean Street
. Walter had promised a
new, improved version of the software to the immortals, but Jill’s mom was
having trouble pulling it together. As the deadline neared, Walter became
increasingly belligerent toward his wife. Carolyn took to eating and sleeping
at her desk, working eighteen to twenty hours a day. Walter started staying
home from the office, pacing the rosewood floors of the living room all day,
drinking wine straight from the bottle.

On a Sunday night in December,
the deadline for
Clean Street 2.0
only twenty-four hours away, Jill’s
father burst into her bedroom in the middle of the night, reeking of alcohol, a
crazed look in her eyes.

“You have to help her,” he said.
“You’re good with computers. You could do it.”