The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (5 page)

“He’s out,” Nicky said, “but wait where you are. I’m gonna pull the car to the back side of the house.”

“Is someone out there?”

“Yes, I’ll explain later. Just sit tight.”

Nicky ended the call and grabbed her car keys from the bag. Then she went through the foyer, past the kitchen, and into the hallway that led to the back door. There were two cars and a Jeep parked out back already, but there was still plenty of room for the BMW Nicky brought. Strolling leisurely around the side of the house and out to the front, Nicky found her car in the center of the circular driveway, right where she’d parked it.

Her two followers were still where she’d left them. They had parked their green station wagon behind the mulberry tree down the street.

Nicky shook her head. Whoever these spies were that Melissa had sent to follow her, they were about as subtle as a rhinoceros. Two teenage boys in a junker of a car who made only a minimal effort to hide themselves. Clearly, Melissa didn’t think professionals were in order, and why would she? If Nicky was her slave now, the worst that Nicky would do is report back to Melissa that two kids were following her.

It would have been easy for Nicky to lose these jokers on the way to Art’s, but she figured it was better to let them tag along. On the face of it, there was nothing suspicious about what she was doing. Art had come to her after-party last night; she was coming to his house tonight. So long as the spies reported that Nicky came here alone, there wasn’t much for Melissa to worry about.

Nicky pulled the car around to the back side of the house, parked next to the Jeep, and did a final check to make sure there were no cameras or spying eyes nearby. Confident that no one could see her, Nicky opened the trunk and let Jill out. Together, they went back into the house and found their way to Art.

“He’s just laid out in the middle of the floor?” Jill said. “I thought you were going to put him in his bed.”

“We never made it that far,” said Nicky. “The drink that Patrick made—Art started tripping out a few minutes after he drank it, and then he was gone. I didn’t even get to use the Addonox.”

Nicky looked at the lace bandage on her little finger as she spoke. A needle was hidden inside that bandage, meant to prick Art’s neck once they had what they needed from him. The needle was coated in Addonox, a knockout drug that Ventigen invented to subdue anyone the immortals wanted taken away, including jackals kidnapped off the streets.

Nicky still remembered the horrible nightmares she had when a dose of Addonox knocked her out, and was glad for Art that she didn’t have to use it yet.

“You mean the drink just put him to sleep?” Jill said. “Please tell me you were able to get his password.”

“Screw you dad,” said Nicky.

Jill looked at her, confused.

“That’s the password, I think” said Nicky.

“Screw you dad is his password?” said Jill.

Nicky nodded. “Either that, or he had to get something off his chest before he went under.”

“Geez,” Jill muttered. She turned to Art’s sleeping body. “Daddy issues much?” she said. “And how do I spell that password? Are there any spaces or hyphens? Do I capitalize the first letter of each word? Do I use any weird spellings? If I were making that my password I would end it with an exclamation point to add an extra character for security and to really drive home the sentiment.”

“He didn’t elaborate,” said Nicky. “He barely got the words out before he was unconscious.”

“Well, they’re likely using security software that my mom wrote, meaning we have three chances to get it right before we’re permanently locked out,” said Jill, the tone in her voice suggesting that she was excited at this new obstacle in her path. “Point me at a computer so I can get to work.”

“What about Art? Shouldn’t we move him to his bed?”

“I have no idea what to do about Art,” said Jill. “If he hasn’t had any Addonox, for all we know he might wake up. I think we should leave him there for now and you should keep an eye on him. If he wakes up, use your needle to knock him out.”

“Got it,” said Nicky, happy that Jill had was taking charge. This version of Jill, the brilliant, confident computer hacker, was the one Nicky liked best.

Nicky put her phone and her keys down on the mantle near the entryway, then led Jill back to the study, where a razor thin silver laptop sat on a glass table in the corner. Jill turned it on and sat down at the keyboard.

“We’ll try all lower case with no spaces first,” she said.

She typed in the password. A window with a red X appeared on the screen.

“Okay, I guess I’ll try capitalizing the first letter of each word,” she said.

Again, her password was met with the red X of rejection.

“This is it,” she said. “Last try. If I type in the wrong password one more time, it’s over. Art’s login will be locked until another partner at the firm reinstates it with a new password. What do you think we should try? Hyphens? Does Art seem like a guy who would use hyphens?”

“No,” said Nicky. “He’s too lazy for that. Try replacing the word ‘you’ with just the letter, like you’re texting.”

“Okay. Are you sure? I mean…this is our last chance.”

Nicky shrugged. She wasn’t sure of anything.

“Maybe we should try to wake him up,” Jill said.

“No, we’re messing with him enough already,” said Nicky. “He gets to sleep now. I’m worried we might kill him if we put his body through anything more right now.”

“Well this is it. Whatever I type in now is our final answer. What do you think? Should I go with all lower case, no hyphens, and the letter u?”

Nicky looked at the keyboard, imagining Art sitting at a computer and entering his password for the first time. Clearly he was in a rebellious mood when he created it. He would have typed it quickly, without much thought. He would have blurted it out through his fingers before he had a chance to take it back.

She raised her hands and put them on imaginary keys in the air, pretending to be Art, angry at his father and blowing off steam with words he’d always wanted to say. She followed the movements of her fingers, each hand taking its turn.
Left-right-left-right-left…

“Not the letter u,” she said, seeing her left index finger reaching for the y key.
y-o-u…pinkie hits the shift key…

“Capital D,” Nicky said.

Jill raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Yes, even in his little moment of rebellion, Art would fear his father enough to capitalize Dad.”

Jill typed the password as instructed.

“We’re in!” she said. “Nicky Bloom I could kiss you!”

“No thanks. I’m all kissed out tonight. I’ll leave you to your work. How long do you need?”

Jill didn’t answer. Her fingers were clapping across the keyboard; her eyes were glued to the screen. Nicky had seen this before. Once Jill got going on a hacking job, she was like a machine.

Nicky stepped out of the study and quietly closed the door behind her.

Chapter 4

While Jill hacked away at the database, Nicky explored the Tremblay mansion. She started with the bedroom next to the study.

If the main entry was Merv’s walk-in trophy case, this bedroom was a museum in his honor. Photos of Merv standing with every power player in Washington lined the walls. Framed thank you notes and letters of appreciation from dignitaries and business titans hung near the window. And sitting alone on the far wall, where it could catch the perfect lighting, was a huge oil portrait of Merv the hunter in all his glory. The portrait showed him standing in the tall grass of the African plain, a comically large rifle propped against his shoulder, his finger on the trigger. He wore a beige flak suit and hard hat, like some Colonial British adventurer, and he stared down the barrel of his gun, begging the viewer to imagine what awesome prey was about to get shot.

The next room over was a strange, almost sad, bit of space. Clearly meant to honor the children the way the previous room honored Merv, it was an untended, incomplete project. Childhood photos of Art and his older brother Reggie gave way to photos of Reggie by himself to photos of Reggie out hunting with his dad. There were photos of Reggie and Merv in a pine forest in winter, in a tropical jungle, and on the side of a mountain. Art was in none of these shots. He had the opposite wall, and all he got were his school pictures, one after another in sequential order. In the middle school photos he wore colorful polo shirts. In the high school photos he wore suits. A few inches of wall space separated Art from the rest of his family, but it might as well have been an ocean for what it implied.

Art’s mother, who had lived in this home only a few months ago, was nowhere to be found in any of these pictures. It was that kind of divorce. The fighting parties didn’t just want to separate; they wanted to stamp each other out of existence.

The more Nicky looked, the more the Tremblay mansion left her depressed. Fifty rooms, most of them untouched by the two bachelors who still lived here. Art’s older brother was off at college. His mother lived across town. Two men and a team of servants—that was the Tremblay home. Sure, there were still great parties at this mansion—an invite to one of Merv’s cocktail hours meant you were a power player in DC—but what about the rest of the time?

Nicky went back through the foyer with all its animals. She stopped to check on Art, who was still sleeping soundly. She went to the sitting area beyond the giant moose and grabbed a pillow from one of the couches. She brought it back for Art and laid it gently under his head. He let out a soft whimper as she did so. He had a smirk on his face. Hopefully he was someplace nice at the moment, someplace better than here.

The west wing of the mansion had a giant indoor pool with a cascading waterfall, a game room with two pool tables and a pinball machine, a small movie theater with a full-size screen, and a dining room with a long mahogany table and twenty chairs. Past the dining room, Nicky found an intersection between three hallways. One hall led to the garage, where Merv’s collection of sports cars from around the world was stored. Another hall led to the kitchen, and was meant for servants. But the third hall, the one to the right….

That hall dead-ended at a small door. Unlike any of the other doors in the house, which had beautiful engraving and filigree on the handles, this one was plain wood with a plain brass doorknob. And it was locked.

Nicky ran back to the foyer where Art was still sleeping peacefully. Remembering something lumpy pushing up against her earlier, she reached into his front pocket and pulled out his keychain. She took it back down the hall and to the locked door. She tried every key on the keychain. Not a one of them worked.

She placed Art’s keys on the floor, pulled off her right earring, and straightened out the earwire. She slid the earwire into the center of the lock and began to jiggle it up and down. With each upward pull, the steel pins in the lock pressed their shape into the soft silver wire. She could feel herself getting closer, the wire stretching to the back of the lock. She was seconds away from getting the door open when she heard the Jada Razor jingle that was her ringtone. She had left her phone on the mantle in the foyer. She thought about letting it ring, but then decided it might be a distraction to Jill. Leaving her earwire in the lock, she ran back to the foyer.

She found her phone in time to see that the incoming call was from Ryan Jenson.

Her first thought was to shut the phone off, that now was a terrible time to take a call from anyone, much less from him, that she needed to think about the mission and Ryan wasn’t a part of the mission anymore.

It rang again. She had to act now. She felt an urgency to make it stop ringing. She reached for the button to shut it off, but at the last second, she pressed answer instead.

“Hello?”

Chapter 5

“Hey Nicky. It’s Ryan.”

Silence. Nicky ran on the balls of her feet, scurrying as quietly as she could to get out of the foyer where Jill might hear her talking on the phone.

“Hello?” Ryan said.

“Just a minute,” Nicky whispered.

She ran back to the hallway, back to the earwire she’d left in the locked door.

“Okay, sorry about that,” she said. “I had to get someplace quiet.”

“That’s okay,” Ryan said. “I understand. I had to do the same thing…step away, that is.”

“Oh yeah?” Nicky said. She knelt down on the floor and got back to work jiggling her earwire. “Step away from what?”

“We’re having a little get-together at my house. Kind of an after-after-party, if you know what I mean.”

Nicky stopped jiggling.

“Are you telling me that Kim Renwick’s at your house?”

“Yep. Pretty stupid of me to call since you and Kim are mortal enemies now. I’ll have to come up with something to say when I get back to the party. What do you suppose I should tell everyone?”

“I don’t know. Who might you normally call at this time of night?”

“Good question. Unfortunately, they all know the answer. No one. I don’t really talk on the phone much. I think I’ll need a different cover story. I’ll probably just say I had to go to the bathroom.”