Assured Destruction (8 page)

Chapter 13

I
nside Fenwick is manning the cash, and he smiles at me as I enter, showing three gold teeth and shakes my hand like I’ve just won the kettlebell championship. Seeing him reminds me of my mother’s business problems; she would have had to call him in to cover for her, and that takes money. Normally she takes care of the cash until lunch since we get so few customers.

I’m about to head downstairs to start rebuilding my network when Fenwick starts to stutter something, waving his hand around as he searches for the right words.

“Mother tell
up, up
.” He points.

I take the elevator to delay the lecture another sixty seconds.

The doors open on the second floor, and my mom waits for me in her chair next to the couch.

“Sit down,” she says.

I sit on the armchair, as far away as possible.

For the next minute she stares at me. I’ve never seen my mom so disappointed.

“Your comparing Ellie Wise to a donut, a dog, and a fart is unacceptable.” I try not to laugh, hearing my mom say fart. “And you made fun of another girl the day before? What am I to do with you?” Tears well in her eyes, and my smirk crumbles.

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“You! You’re so smart, but you’re failing. You don’t try. I
am
giving you too many hours at work. I can take some more, or maybe Fenwick …” She trails off and I know we can’t afford more Fenwick. “Your courses matter. How you perform will decide if you earn scholarships. I don’t know if a scholarship is even possible now—suspension.” She unclasps her hands and stares at them.

I know she’s right, too. I need a scholarship if I’m going to continue my education, or I need to make a lot of money fast. But all of this. Almost all of it. Can be cleared up if I hunt down who is doing all the nasty business and drag it into the light. It’s probably some other kid, and we don’t even need to bring the police into it. Hopefully tracking down the people behind Heckleena and Frannie will provide clues. For now, I have to take my punishment in order to protect my mom.

“I’ll do better, Mom. I can’t explain how I’m going to fix all of this, but I am.”

She eyes me. “It’s not just school. You were rude to Peter last night.”

This I don’t have to take. “Come on, Mom, how can I take him seriously? He’s ancient.”

My mom draws a breath and releases it before continuing. “He’s an accomplished man, who is handsome, and good to me. I’m not asking you to think of him as a father.”

“Right, because he could be your father,” I say.

“Janus, whom I date is my business and I can’t ask you to like him, but you will be pleasant to him.” She folds her hands away into her lap.

“I’m your daughter, Mom, so it is my business and I don’t understand it, okay?” I really do want to figure out her relationship. I need some way to ask for his last name without raising suspicions.

“You will understand when you reach my age.” She says this as if it’ll end the matter.

“You mean, if I need money? Because that’s all I can see. That you need his money.”

She pauses; tears streak her cheeks. “I’m.” She draws another sharp breath. “I’m not a … not a whore.”

“I didn’t say whore!” I shoot forward and clutch her hands, but she pulls away.

“Get out of here, Janus.” She points to the stairs. “Just leave.”

Holy crap, what have I done? She’s turned in her chair and is wheeling for the kitchen. To be as far away from me as possible.

“I—”

“Out!” She keeps wheeling and slams the kitchen door behind.

I shuffle to the exit, slipping down each step of the stairs.

“It go good you?” Fenwick grins when I reach the store.

“No, Fenwick, not good for me,” I say. “Why don’t you go home?”

He frowns and looks at his watch.

“Just go,” I say. “Sorry, please, just go.”

He looks back twice more at the stairwell, and I realize I’m taking money out of his pocket by forcing him to go home. I don’t care, he can have his pay. I just want to be alone until I can face my broken Shadownet. Finally he leaves, and without another word, which isn’t like him.

The day’s quiet as a graveyard. I have a chance to check my mom’s computer, which seems fine. I’ll fix the server tonight and make a copy of her files just in case. A customer drops off an old IBM ThinkPad that seems in decent shape. I decide to refurbish it. It’s not that I haven’t learned my lesson; I just want to connect to the Internet using something that isn’t infected.

The laptop’s missing the power cord, and I find a candidate in a box in the basement. I promise myself that I’m not going to look at any of the files and boot it up. It’s old enough that it doesn’t have a WiFi card, but I have some old ones around. Twenty minutes later I’m on the Web. My forehead relaxes and my face smoothes. On the Web I’m in my element, even though someone is swimming in my territory. The browser is frustratingly slow, but I can begin to search.

Frannie Mouthwater’s real name was Stephanie Meeps. Meeps is not a common name, I hope, but I doubt she has much of an Internet presence given her journal is filled with unicorns and rainbows. Her father is a David Meeps; her mother, Helen Meeps. Their digital fingerprints were all over her computer as I suspect it was theirs at the outset.

Since Frannie would only be about twelve, I search for David Meeps first. I still get thousands of hits and add LinkedIn as a key word. LinkedIn is a social network for business types and I recall that David was some sort of numbers guy—accountant, I’m guessing. I find eight Meeps on LinkedIn, two in finance and only one relatively local—looks like they moved to Montreal, a big city about an hour and a half east of here. He doesn’t blog or have a website, but I can see that he works for Naylar and I could call him and ask if Stephanie’s all right. How normal would that be? He’s linked to his wife, which makes life easy for me. She’s a nurse at a Montreal area hospital. She too has no website or social network that I can track down for updates on her daughter.

Without any luck so far, I type in Stephanie Meeps, but don’t expect much from Google. There’s an eighteen-year-old punk rocker named Meeps, but nothing younger. This Meeps has enough piercings to be on the cover of the next
Hell Raiser
movie. Definitely not my gal. I keep searching, but Punk Meeps overwhelms the search results. Just for the hell of it, I friend her on Facebook, then swallow hard at the notification badges littering my own wall. On my Facebook profile, I’ve got a ton of comments and have lost a couple hundred friends.

Your profile is hacked again.

Everyone defriend her!
This from Hannah; I guess I deserve it.

My mom saw your message, thanks a lot.

UR Hacked!

Loooseeerrrr!

Screw you.

Nice pic!

My profile pic shows a donkey; Chippy is taunting me with the same picture I put up on his blog! But I can’t use that as evidence either; I’d have to admit I hacked him first. I’d changed my password this morning, so whomever it is has managed to figure it out a second time.

About half the notes are from haters, the other half from people trying to help me out. The damage is done. I change my password—something I should evidently do hourly—and post a general notice.

So, so sorry. I’ve been hacked again, anything you’ve received from me in the last twenty-four hours didn’t come from me.

I see a post from Karl.

Hey everyone, this is obviously not Jan anymore, so please stop saying mean things to her.
Thanks, Karl! Of course, he has ten comments, all telling him off.

Back on Meeps’s page, I see I can “like” her and I do, bringing up her fan page.

Hometown: Ottawa.

Huh. I’m sort of let down. The computer must have been older than I had thought. All this time
my
Frannie has been a goodie two-shoes, and now I see that in reality she’s a hardcore rocker. Moreover, the real Meeps is probably a lot more interesting than my Frannie. The computer must have been lying around for five years before they got rid of it. Meeps has a blog and I click through.

Blackmailed!
it announces. Turns out that those journals that were so cute and cuddly and heart-warming are now dead weight. A fetish for unicorns and rainbows is good if you’re a children’s author but not an asset when fans prefer you to have a thing for tattoos and fishnet stockings. She’s laughing it off, but clearly someone tried. Pictures of gutted unicorns and colorless rainbows are strewn over the blog to prove her point. I will have to download myself some Meeps music.

With an attack on Meeps confirmed, but no real damage done, I turn my attention to Heckleena’s forerunner. There’s a reason why Heckleena was my first. Much like Roz Shaftsbury, she was this bitchy woman who walked in, demanding she be served first and left in a huff when I wouldn’t, dropping the computer where she stood and walking out. But not before saying, and I quote:

“I should have just tossed it in the garbage. Try to do something right and the peons will stop you at every turn.”

She called me a peon. With my mom bedridden, a line of customers to service, and a week’s homework to do, she called me a peon. Heckleena was born.

Her real name is Aina Ehrstrom and if I recall correctly she didn’t have a job that I could find. Ottawa’s home to a lot of government workers (one of the reasons why it’s so boring), and I always suspected she was in government. I try searching for her, but Ehrstrom is common enough that I don’t get decent results. I add search terms for Ottawa and government and have one hit. A photo of a dozen people from a society party. Beside her is Andrew Ehrstrom, ambassador to Canada from Finland. In a quick search I see he’s ambassador no longer. Aina isn’t on the continent. I feel sorry for the peons of Finland.

With my concerns over Aina and Meeps allayed, I log in to my Apple developer account and work on Jonny’s app. Three more customers interrupt my coding, but all in all a decent day, and I even manage to forget about what I said to my mom until I hit the intercom to see if she wants pizza for dinner.

“No,” she says coolly. “Peter’s cooking tonight. He doesn’t do pizza.”

Another nail in his soon-to-be needed coffin. Who doesn’t like pizza? Suddenly, I see my chance to learn his last name.

“No Italian blood in him, I guess.” I’m trying to act casual, but it’s sounding a bit forced. “I mean, what’s his heritage anyways?”

“What are you talking about?” My mom’s voice is deeply suspicious and a little confused.

“Just saying, he looks like a Bergmann or a MacNeil rather than a Michelangelo.” I swallow hard.

“Moore—it’s Welsh I think,” she replies.

“That makes sense, the Welsh hate pizza. Okay, bye!”

I hang up. I finally have Peter’s last name, but
Moore
sounds way too common. I Google it to be sure and come up with thirteen million hits. Peter Moore in Ottawa is little better at ten million pages. To buy any sort of credit report I’ll need his address and social insurance number. That won’t be easy.

I check my email, actually hoping a teacher has sent me homework, but there’s nothing from school. But there’s an email from Karl. I hold my breath as I click through.

The subject line reads
We support you …
The body of the email continues:
Everyone knows you’re awesome at tech stuff, but I’m totally amazed by you being a hacker. You have to teach me some day. One day we’re all going to be working for you. SUSPENDED, that’s cool. Annoying, I bet, but cool.

Of course, I’m happy but—he likes me because I’m a suspended hacker? Boys are messed. And who’s
we?
I’m betting Ellie and that sucks the romance out of the email. He’s also asked me out to the movies, to which I reply that, unfortunately, it may be cool to not have to go to school, but I’m also grounded for the foreseeable future.

On Frannie’s account, my torturer has vanished. She’s won a new car, another lottery, she needs to act FAST on an investment opportunity, and must update her MasterCard information, but somehow the fun has gone out of it. The real Meeps shoves her head into mine, and I can’t pull off the innocence Frannie used to have. Heckleena’s still a class-one bitch but I don’t have anything mean left to say. I said it all to my mom earlier.

A certain pastel Mercedes pulls into the lot, fishtailing in the gravel. Peter hops out carrying a bag of groceries and a bouquet of roses.

“Hi ya, Janus!” he says.

I muster a smile. “Hello, Peter.”

“I’m sorry to hear you’re having some trouble at school.” He shifts from foot to foot, and I can’t tell if he’s really sorry.

“I’ll work it out, say—” I add. “What do you do?” I glance at his Mercedes.

He grins. “I like to golf, play bridge—”

“For work?”

“I’m retired, Janus.”

“And before that? What was your job?”

He studies me for a minute. “I was a consultant.”

He’s not making this easy. “Of what?”

“Your mom didn’t tell you?” he asks, showing me all his possibly fake teeth like he knows something. “I figured with all the problems you were having she would have mentioned that I worked in the computer industry. Internet security.”

My jaw nearly falls off when it unhinges.

“She didn’t?” He stops shifting. I think his surprise is genuine but I can’t read his eyes.

I shake my head.