Homecoming Masquerade, The (13 page)

J
ill stood just a few feet away
from Annika, looking on like everyone else. It was a sight that had become
commonplace among the senior class – Annika Fleming telling a story to a group
of onlookers, all of them entranced. The girl could work a crowd.

The story now was about Annika’s
Uncle Charlie, “a Nebraska hick from the deepest, emptiest parts of the corn
country,” who somehow ended up at a charity gala in Oklahoma City and hysterics
ensued.

The crowd for Annika’s story
included all the usual suspects from her gang, but also a good collection of
new faces, people who had their own crowds to hang with but loved a good story
so they stayed to listen. Isabella and Pauline, Emily and Dana, the McGuire
twins – all of them were gathered just behind the bar, forming a half-circle
around Annika, and laughing so hard they could barely breathe.

Annika was in rare form tonight.
Her joyous charisma was completely cut loose by the wine and all the pent-up
energy of her peers, who were eager to find a reason to be happy on this night,
which was supposed to be one of the best of their lives. As Jill watched this
virtuoso performance, she thought about what a difference a few months can
make. She remembered how Annika was in early June, when Shannon’s death in a
boating accident was still fresh on everybody’s mind. Shannon had been one of
Annika’s closest friends, and for a time after her death, there was no place in
Annika’s heart for boisterous storytelling and drunken laughter.

The funeral for Shannon Evans
and her parents, who had also died in the accident, began at St. Andrew’s
Cathedral and processed to the Evans family cemetery in Alexandria, where a
bronze memorial statue was unveiled. The memorial was a three-sided pylon, each
side bearing a plaque for one member of the family. It was a small memorial by
the standards of the social sphere in which the Evans family lived, so much so
that Jill couldn’t help but wonder if the survivors were being purposefully discreet.
In Washington, the deceased were either celebrated or forgotten, and the way
Shannon’s surviving family had put together the memorial, it looked like
Shannon and her parents were going to be forgotten.

Forgotten wasn’t the glamorous
way to go, but it was much safer for the survivors. All too often in DC, an
early death meant someone had raised the ire of an immortal. In the case of
Shannon and her parents, that was almost certainly the case.

On the day they died, the Evans
family took their yacht,
The Lavender Rose
, on an unscheduled outing.
They made no arrangements with the pier to have the boat prepared, they didn’t
hire any deckhands, and they didn’t commission a captain. They just showed up
before sunrise and took the boat into the open water, riding past the buoys
even though a storm was coming in.

The call for help came from
Shannon’s dad. At the time he made the call, the weather was bad, but not so
bad that an experienced sailor couldn’t navigate through it. When the Coast
Guard arrived and the boat was nowhere to be found, their first assumption was
that Shannon’s dad had navigated his way to calmer waters. It wasn’t until a
day later that divers were employed.

They pulled up
The Lavender
Rose
with a four foot hole in its bow. Shannon and her parents were
pronounced dead.

All of this would have been
considered strange in a normal town, but in DC, no one dared ask the questions
that immediately came to mind. Questions like: Why was the Evans family in such
a hurry to take out their boat? Where were they going? Why didn’t they hire any
help if they were going so far off the coast? Why didn’t they check the weather
before they left?

How did that big hole get in
their boat in the open water?

Nobody asked because the mere
presence of these questions gave the only answer anyone needed. The Evans
family had angered someone important. Now they were dead.

And their survivors were being
careful not to go overboard in celebrating their lives. The funeral was
tasteful and quaint. Colleagues of Shannon’s parents joined members of the Thorndike
senior class in the private cemetery and said kind words about the deceased.
People cried. They hugged. They moved on.

Except for Annika. To her,
Shannon’s death was a tragedy that was worthy of more than a two-hour mourning
period. While everyone else went right back to their lives the minute the
funeral was over, Annika went into exile, her friends claiming she had locked
herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out.

Jill remembered that time well.
Early summer in DC, the first round of fabulous summer getaways already
starting for the Thorndike community, and the most outgoing, popular girl in
school was locked in her bedroom. Annika never asked her friends to skip their
trip to Cozumel, but they did anyway. It was very eye-opening to Jill. There
was no good reason for Mattie, Jenny and the rest to stay home, but so powerful
was Annika’s influence on them that they couldn’t leave while she was in pain.

Jill was watching all of this
play out when Gia Rossi approached her about the plan to get Nicky Bloom into
Thorndike. The Network wanted to fill Shannon’s vacant spot in the senior class
with an undercover agent who would not only enter Coronation, but win. It was a
plan so bold as to be absurd, but Gia called it, “Our one and only chance to
kill Sergio Alonzo, a mission we must attempt, even if we all die trying.”

Perhaps it was the timing that
made Annika’s role so obvious in all this. Jill’s first task that summer was to
figure out how in the world a new girl who was totally unknown in Washington
could somehow stir up enough support to win Coronation. The new girl needed a
group of friends who were easily manipulated. A group of friends who were so
devoted to their leader they would stay home from Cozumel just because she was
sad.

If they got Annika to support
Nicky Bloom, they got all of Annika’s admirers as well.

The road to Annika went through
Mattie Dupree, who was Annika’s Number 1 now that Shannon was gone. Jill and
Mattie, though not good chums, had a friendly relationship dating back to their
time as lab partners in freshman biology. Still, the thought of making that
first phone call out of the blue, that
Hi Mattie I know we haven’t talked
much but I want to be friends
sort of moment – it terrified Jill. She was
so nervous about coming across as a fraud that she spent a week preparing
herself for the phone call. She imagined hours of conversation between herself
and Mattie, conversations about the sad state of Annika’s psyche, the cute boys
at school, the goings on around town, the girls who might wear black to
Homecoming, and for each topic, Jill imagined the ideal things she could say
and wrote them down.

Lunch with Mattie led to
afternoons shopping with Mattie and Jenny led to a movie outing with Mattie,
Jenny, Vince, and Jake which led to more lunches, more shopping...when Annika
came out of mourning just before Independence Day, Jill was a bona fide member
of the group. Annika was more than welcoming of this new addition; the first
time Annika joined the group for lunch that summer she gave Jill a big hug, as
if there was nothing unusual about her presence. A week later, Annika herself
invited Jill to join the gang on their rescheduled trip to Cozumel.

Beach volleyball, body surfing,
frozen drinks with little umbrellas, open fires on the beach at night, looking
at boys with Jenny, talking about boys with Mattie, parasailing, water skiing,
scuba diving—a funny thing happened to Jill during those weeks. In pretending
to like these people, she came to actually enjoy their company. It was something
Gia had warned her about.

“Every undercover operative is
in danger of losing her identity at any time,” Gia had said. “It’s something
you must both accept and look out for. You will come to see yourself as one of
them. If you didn’t, you’d be doing a poor job. But you must take time every
day to remind yourself who you really are and why you’re really here, lest you
lose yourself entirely.”

For Jill, those reminders of who
she really was came late at night, when everyone retired to their separate
rooms in the Veranda Hotel and Resort on the beach. Before getting in bed, Jill
spent at least an hour every night hacking into the admissions database at
Thorndike, laying the groundwork for Nicky Bloom to go from absolute nobody to
ideal candidate for the open spot in the senior class. Those late-night hacking
sessions brought Jill back to reality, and kept her brain aware that there was
a larger purpose in all this, that she was more than another rich girl on the
beach.

On the morning of their
second-to-last day in Cozumel, Jill feigned a hangover, releasing herself from
the day’s scheduled activity (cliff diving behind a beach house Jake’s family
had purchased last winter). Jill watched from her tenth floor window as the
limo took away all her friends, then she retrieved a plastic box from a hidden
compartment in her luggage. Inside that box was a key card encoder that Gia had
given her.

Jill had asked for two keycards
to her room at check-in. One of those key cards had been with her throughout
the trip. The other had been held safe in her luggage, not needed until now.
Taking the spare key card and the encoder box, Jill left her room and took the
elevator to the top floor, room 1858, Annika’s room.

She slid her spare key card into
the lock on Annika’s door. An LED on the lock turned red, notifying her that
she was not granted access. Jill removed the card and put it in the encoder
box, which read the trace magnetic signature the lock had left on the card. Two
seconds passed, then the encoder spit out the card, which was now re-keyed to
open Annika’s door. Jill slid the card in the lock, watched the LED turn green,
and opened the door.

She was surprised at the mess in
Annika’s room. Housekeeping hit these hotel rooms daily, yet somehow Annika had
found a way to scatter clothes, makeup, and toiletries everywhere. Jill was
careful not to disturb a thing on her way to the desk at the back corner of the
suite. Paying close attention to the position of the chair before she moved it,
Jill sat in front of Annika’s open laptop and turned it on. She interrupted the
boot-up before the operating system was loaded, and began controlling the
computer at the command level, speaking directly to the compiler. In a few
minutes, all the secrets that made this laptop run were revealed to her.
Annika’s user name and password, the network key that identified its operating
system, the GUID, the CPU number, the IP address.

She allowed the boot-up to
continue, and used Annika’s user name and password to gain full access to the
operating system. She pulled a thumb drive from her pocket and plugged it in,
installing a modified version of the software she had written freshman year to
spy on her classmates. This new version gave her total (and invisible) access
to Annika’s laptop and everything on it. Jill took a moment to check the
install, ensuring it worked as planned and, more importantly, left no trace of
its presence. Satisfied that all was well, she shut down the computer and left.

That night, after everyone
returned from their scuba excursion, Annika got online. Everything she did was
visible to Jill.

Annika surfed the Net, visiting
the web site for a band named Grogtail, then a web site for amateur artists,
then her social media pages.

She sent an email to the
sculptor who was making her mask for Homecoming, asking for an update.

She sent another email, from a
free web mail site, but didn’t use her own name.

Jill, who had been dozing in and
out of sleep, sat up straight in her chair and paid closer attention. Why was
Annika sending emails under someone else’s name?

The name she was using was Zhang
Li Gong, and the person she was emailing was named Hong Chung.

“What in the world?” Jill
whispered.

At first she suspected that her
software was malfunctioning, and somehow had intercepted computer activity from
China, but the contents of the email were definitely from Annika.

Dearest Hong,

Cozumel Day Six. Scuba diving
with everyone except for Liu, who had too much to drink last night. I’m going
to have to teach that girl how to party...

The email went on to describe a
day of scuba diving between a girl and her friends, only all the friends had
Chinese names.

Chen spotted a turtle and
then dove all the way to the bottom trying to catch it, the dork. Duan and Xu’s
on-again off-again status is back to on-again – they couldn’t keep their hands
off each other today. And Ming – that girl is so strange – be glad you aren’t
here. She’d be driving you nuts. She had no interest in actual scuba diving,
just in cannonball diving off the side of the boat. She thought she was funny,
but let me tell you, after an hour, it’s not funny. I would have made her stop
but I wasn’t in the mood. I tell you, I’m not myself these days. I miss you
more than I can put into words. I love you so much. I’m counting the days until
we can be together again.

Love you,

Zhang

Annika was describing her day,
but giving everyone a code name. Liu, the one who had too much to drink, was
Jill, who had skipped the outing with a phony hangover. Chen, the dork who
chased a turtle, sounded an awful lot like Jake. The strange girl who
cannonballed off the side of the boat was named Ming in the email but was
almost certainly Norah, who probably wouldn’t be invited on anymore of Annika’s
fabulous trips. And the on-again off-again couple named Duan and Xu were Mattie
and Vince, who had been a couple in and out of hiatus since freshman year.

More interesting than any of
this was the sign-off. Who was Hong Chung, this mystery man who not only got a
recap of Annika’s day, but a “Love you” at the end? It appeared Annika had a
secret boyfriend, one so secret that they had to use anonymous email accounts
where all the names had been changed to Chinese. It was smart of them.
Clean
Street
was always surfing the web, always reading emails. It looked for key
words that identified what was going on in the context of an email
conversation, and picked out proper names. Had Annika typed in Jill and Mattie
and Jake and the rest, it wouldn’t matter that she was using an anonymous
account.
Clean Street
would find those names and know who was typing.
Whatever Annika and ‘Hong Chung’ wanted to keep so secret that they were using
anonymous web mail accounts – to
Clean Street
, it wouldn’t be secret at
all if Annika was using real names.