The Beautiful and the Wicked (24 page)

“Wow,” Lila said, but her mind wasn't on Sam's sorrow—­it was on this new piece of information. What on earth was Jack working on?

“So today, I decide to try to talk to him. Like, I'm not a sex doll, right? I'm an actual human being. So I ask him what he's typing all the time. He tells me I won't understand. Nice, right? Like I'm too dumb to figure out what the great Jack Warren is working on. But I press him. I tell him I want to know. He says I'm spoiling the mood. So I stop pushing him. Things progress. I'm down on my knees in front of him doing you know what . . .” Sam gave Lila a knowing look, to which Lila nodded in response. “Then he says to me, and you won't believe this . . . he says . . . Christ, I don't even think I can say it . . . he said, ‘You know the best thing about having my dick in your mouth? You can't ask any questions.' Can you believe it? He's lucky I didn't bite the thing off.”

Lila didn't say anything. All she could think of was, This is the man my sister loves? This is the man who is about to ruin her life? The more she heard about Jack, the more she believed he deserved to die. Who
wouldn't
want to kill that son of a bitch?

But, as she promised Teddy, she couldn't let her feelings get in the way of her investigation. She needed to stay clearheaded. And what she really needed, more than anything, was to get onto Jack's computer.

Lucky for her, Lila's chance to gain unfettered access to Jack's room came a few hours later, when, on the voyage back to Miami, Jack got the call he'd been waiting for: the golden phallus had finally been recovered. One of the teams of deep-­sea explorers he'd contracted to locate Poe's discarded work of art had just hauled it onto their ship and were about an hour away from
The
Rising Tide
. Soon the two ships would meet in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, and Jack could get his treasure back. Lila decided that while Jack was overseeing the transfer and settling up the small king's ransom he'd promised to the divers, she'd be in his room, making a complete copy of his hard drive.

 

CHAPTER 21

L
ILA WALKED
INTO
the shaded elegance of Jack's stateroom and quickly headed toward the giant mahogany desk in the corner. She knew this was a risky move, but it was her only chance. She had to get a copy of Jack's hard drive, and she had to get it now.

Just seconds ago, she'd slipped away from the guests and crew who had gathered together on the main deck to watch as a giant crane from a rusty old ship transferred Poe's golden phallus to
The Rising Tide
. She'd only have a precious ­couple of minutes before this tender homecoming party disbanded. So she had to be fast.

She grabbed Jack's laptop from the middle drawer of the desk. Her heart pounding, she inserted her thumb drive and began downloading. It would only take a minute—­but, it turned out, that wasn't long enough.

To Lila's horror, the door to Jack's room opened without any chance for her to hide. She flipped around so that her body was concealing the laptop. But she knew it was hopeless. Any chance of saving her sister was falling to pieces before her eyes . . .

And then Sam walked in.

Seeing Lila must have shocked Sam, because she let out a bloodcurdling scream that would have sent
someone
running in their direction if everyone else on the yacht hadn't been watching the statue transfer at that very moment.

“Holy fuck!” Sam panted as she shut the door behind her. “You scared the shit out of me!”

“What are you doing here?” Lila asked. She knew perfectly well what Sam was doing, or about to do, in Jack's room, but she was buying time until the downloading had been completed.

“I came to see Jack,” Sam said with no hint of embarrassment in her voice. “Did you come for the same thing?” she added, eyeing Lila suspiciously.

“Of course not. Sam, you know I would never do that to you. No, Slaughterhouse asked me to come put Jack's laptop away. She said she forgot to put it back where it belonged,” Lila explained as she deftly removed the drive and turned to reveal the open laptop sitting on Jack's desk. “See?” she said as she slid the laptop back into the drawer.

Sam was clearly too busy worrying that Lila was also sleeping with Jack to give a thought to the fact that she'd just caught Lila with his computer. Talk about a close call.

“Dinner's soon, huh?” Lila said as she turned to leave. “Guess I'll see you up there?”

“Yeah, see you later,” Sam replied.

Just as Lila was shutting Jack's door behind her, she saw Sam begin to remove her clothes.

L
ILA HAD
TO
wait until all the day's duties were done to examine what, exactly, she'd copied from Jack's computer. Once she and Sam had retired to their cabin and Sam's breathing fell into the even rhythm of sleep, Lila was able to dig in.

For the first hour or so going through Jack's data, she found nothing. But she knew to keep digging. After all Sam said that Jack was constantly working on something. It had to be buried in the files somewhere. As Lila clicked around the travel itineraries and updates from Kingston S. Duxbury about his new catamaran, she started to worry that she'd come to a dead end.

But then, Lila found a curious file labeled
Nautilus
. Maybe, she hoped, this was it. But the moment she opened it up and saw screen after screen of Java source code, her heart sank. It might as well have been Greek. If this was what Jack had been tirelessly working on night after night, she didn't have the tools to decipher it. She went online to see if she could translate it herself, but after an hour of moving from the code to the encoder, she hadn't made it past the first line.

She couldn't shake that feeling that this was important, that somewhere in this code lay a clue that could help her solve the case. If Sam was right, and Jack had been devoting all his spare time to working on this piece of source code, it was essential that she at least have some idea of what it was.

What she needed was a brilliant mind, someone who could shed some light on what this endless stream of code actually meant. She knew plenty of hackers from her days as a detective, but they weren't right for this. Jack Warren was the most revolutionary intelligence working in tech today. Whoever could decipher this code needed to be able to match wits with him. What Lila needed was someone of unquestionable genius, and someone she could trust absolutely.

The problem was, she only knew one trustworthy genius: Teddy Hawkins.

If only she could ask Teddy, then all her problems would be solved. Wait, she thought. Teddy! Why not?

She wasn't even taking the idea half-­seriously when she put his name into a search engine and discovered that, in 2008, Teddy was running a small tech consulting firm in Miami, where
The Rising Tide
was set to dock in just a few short hours. But the more she turned the idea around in her mind, the more she thought it was the perfect solution to her problem. All she needed to do was find some excuse to get off the boat, and then she'd stop by his office.

Lila knew that future Teddy wouldn't just say this was a risky and dangerous idea. He'd say it was bat shit insane. She'd met Teddy in the past once before, and future Teddy had insisted that she never let it happen again. But it hadn't hindered her investigation back then and it certainly hadn't changed the present day, so why would it be different this time?

As she clicked through the indecipherable code she tried to think of any possible way to tackle this without Teddy. But no better idea came to her.

Lila decided that she wouldn't tell Teddy who she was, and she certainly wouldn't tell him where the code had come from. If she kept their encounter short and vague, what harm could she possibly do? She knew it was a plan that was a little more fraught with danger than she would've liked, but so was traveling back in time.

A
T ONE O'CL
OCK
the next day, Lila knocked on young Teddy Hawkins's office door. There were butterflies in her stomach, and the hand that clutched the thumb drive was slightly damp with perspiration. At least it had been easy to get there. She hadn't even had to sneak off the boat. It was September 8, the day Ava was set to board the yacht, and just two days away from Jack's birthday, leaving countless things to prepare before they set sail again later that evening. Which meant Edna Slaughter was running around on the verge of a nervous breakdown, shouting more orders than a deranged drill sergeant.

Lila had come up with a perfect excuse to leave the boat by volunteering to go to the Bal Harbour Shops to pick up a few things Elise had ordered. Even in the middle of the ocean, it seemed that Elise Warren could find multiple ways to spend obscene amounts of money. But before heading to the mall, Lila was swinging by Teddy's office.

When the taxi dropped her off at the location she'd written down, she assumed there'd been a mistake.

“Wait here,” she told the driver as she slowly walked up to a run-­down Cuban sandwich shop near the corner of Biscayne Boulevard and NE Twenty-­ninth Street. It was the type of mom-­and-­pop operation where the old signs above the door and in the window were crudely hand-­painted. Then Lila noticed, around the back of the sandwich shop, there was a blue door with a laser-­engraved plaque that read A
RGONAUT
E
NTERPRISES
. After waving the taxi driver away, she went back to the door, pushed the bell, and was immediately buzzed in.

Lila climbed up a steep flight of stairs, covered in stained, gray industrial carpet, toward Teddy's office. She almost couldn't believe that Teddy Hawkins, the aesthete, the billionaire genius whom she knew so well, had started out in a shit hole like this.

Before she reached the top of the stairs, the door opened—­and Teddy stood there looking at her. Lila was surprised to feel her heart leap, her pulse quicken, and an irrepressible smile break out at the sight of him. Only days ago, she'd been in his presence. But now here he was, ten years younger, standing in his dingy office with a puzzled look on his face. He had a boyish roundness to his cheeks and a brightness to his eyes that a decade's worth of struggles and disappointments had long since worn away.

“Nicky Collins,” she said, reaching out to shake his hand. The feel of his skin on hers was like drinking a sip of water after a long thirst. Only at that very moment did Lila realize the toll that being undercover had taken on her; the accumulated strain that weeks of isolation and deception had caused. It was so nice, she thought, just to be with somebody she
knew
. Even if he didn't technically know her—­yet.

“
S
O,”
T
EDDY SAID,
keeping his eyes on the floor. “What brings you here today?” Young Teddy is shy, Lila realized with surprise.

“I've come across a strange file,” she said, trying to contain her excitement at being in his presence again. She felt like she could finally exhale, that for the first time in weeks she wasn't completely on edge.

“What is it?” Teddy prompted.

“Actually,” Lila admitted, “I was hoping
you
could tell
me
. I think it's code, but I'm not sure for what. I don't speak computer, so I need you to be my translator. And I'm happy to pay you handsomely for any insight you can give me.” She tossed the thumb drive over to Teddy, who caught it. And then she pulled a ten-­grand stack of hundred-­dollar bills and threw it on the desk, too. The money arced into the air and landed with a satisfying thud. Teddy's eyes widened at the money, and he sat back in his chair with a stunned look on his face. Lila tried not to dwell on the strangeness of paying Teddy with money that his future self had given her.

She glanced around at the small, humble office, which was incredibly well organized. Always an obsessive reader, Teddy had a stack of books ranging in subject matter from Le Corbusier to Zen Buddhism. A postcard was taped to the wall over his spare and modern Eames desk. Lila recognized it.

“You like de Kooning?” she asked, pointing to the postcard, which showed an abstract painting made up of a jumble of wide and wild brushstrokes in peachy reds, sky blues, smeared whites, and jade greens.

“I love him. He's my favorite painter by far,” Teddy said. He seemed pleased that she recognized the artist, but still confused about what this strange woman was doing in his office.

Lila couldn't help grinning. She knew something that at this very moment in time, Teddy could never imagine. Ten years from now he would own the very painting that was on that postcard taped to an otherwise bare wall. It would become the crown jewel of his art collection: a grand, seven-­foot-­wide Abstract Expressionist masterpiece that he purchased for $85 million. After he bought it at auction, he would confess to Lila that owning that painting was the realization of one of his lifelong dreams.

“Well,” he said, plugging the device into his computer. “How'd you find me, exactly?”

Lila had known he would have lots of questions and had also known she wouldn't be able to answer any of them honestly. “Let's just say we've got a good friend in common.”

“Who?” Teddy asked.

She crossed her arms over her chest and looked him directly in the eyes. “Listen, it's complicated and I don't have time to go into it. All I can tell you is that everything is aboveboard. So please, can you just take a look at this file and tell me what I've got here?”

After a moment of contemplative silence, Teddy nodded. “I'll be honest. You've got me pretty intrigued.”

“The file is called ‘Nautilus.' ”

Lila stood behind Teddy as he clicked it open and scrolled through the text for a minute or two.

“Do you know what it is?”

“Just a minute,” he said impatiently. Whatever was there on the screen seemed very interesting to Teddy. More time passed, and he was still hunched over his desk, mesmerized. Lila looked at her watch, horrified at the time. She should've been back at the boat by now, and she still had to drop by Neiman Marcus to pick up Elise's packages, then rush back to begin tackling her long list of chores in preparation for Jack's fiftieth birthday celebration.

“Listen,” she said, after about almost ten minutes of silence had passed. “I don't mean to rush you, but I've got to go soon. Is there any way you can tell me what this is right now?”

Teddy pushed himself away from his desk and looked up at Lila, blinking himself back into the nondigital world. She couldn't help smiling at him once again.

“At first it seemed rather simple. This is the source code for all of Warren Software's applications translated into machine language. It's cool to see because this code is completely guarded—­nobody outside the programmers at Warren has access to it. I feel like I'm in the land of Oz and someone let me peek behind the curtain.”

“Okay,” Lila said, trying to make sure she understood clearly. “So, these are instructions for how the software works?”

“Kind of. But not really. This is the program, but translated so that the computer can understand it. That's what machine language means. But there's something here that I've never seen before.” He scrolled down and pointed to a bit of gibberish on the screen. Lila had no idea what she was looking at. “Right there,” Teddy said. “That's very unusual. How'd you get this, anyway?”

Lila stayed silent.

“Fine. Not one for answering questions. I get it. I get it,” Teddy said. He returned his attention to the computer screen. “At its most basic, this looks like a pretty standard software update.”

“An update?”

“You know. Those annoying messages you get telling you to update your software? Well, that's what this is. Once this update is put out into the world, everyone who has any of Warren Software's programs on their computers will get a message telling them to install this newer version. But, still . . .” He kept clicking through the file, reading through the strange symbols on the screen. “I just don't quite know what I'm looking at. What I need to do is actually run this update on my computer, then I'll have a better idea about what this mysterious bit of code does. Do you have a ­couple minutes?”