Chapter 32
Chapter 32
Sissy stares in the mirror, her legs still shaking from the adrenaline pumping through her veins. Holy shit! She just jumped off a cliff. And she didn’t die! She definitely thought she was going to. BASE jumping at night off a cliff was nothing like the practice they had done in broad daylight. That was more on the exhilarating side of terrifying. This had been far more terrifying-terrifying.
“You ready?” For the fourth time in as many minutes, Brick’s voice floats through the thin wooden door separating Sissy from the $89-per-night motel room somewhere in the middle of the coast of California. Sissy, having changed into a dry tank top and sweatpants, rubs a cheap threadbare towel through her hair and opens the door. “Geez. Keep your shirt on,” she says. “I told you to go ahead and start without me.”
Brick is flipping the tiny square metal disk over and over with his thumb as easily as he often flips quarters—which, Sissy now recognizes from knowing him for the past six months, is a nervous tic. He probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. He stops when he sees her and grins. “Crazy night, huh?”
“You could say that,” Sissy laughs. And then affixes a mock frown on her face. “You could have told me about the bombs.”
“No, I couldn’t have—you wouldn’t have gone along with it.”
“And Isaac? You knew he was going to do that?”
“Of course. I didn’t know your dad was going to knock him out with a plate, though. I was supposed to tackle him with about two minutes to go and let everyone rush out the front, so the police would think we perished in the explosion.”
“I cannot believe my parents were there.”
“I cannot believe your mom is Jane Brooks!”
Sissy rolls her eyes.
“You’re a lot like her, you know.”
“What? Gross.”
“You are,” Brick says. “Fearless, almost to the point of being reckless.” He raises a brow, giving her a hard stare, and then once he thinks he’s gotten his point across, his face relaxes. “I can tell your mom’s good people. Just like you.”
Sissy concentrates on keeping her face stone-still, but inside she’s positively melting. Her knees go weak again. She’d never admit it to anyone—least of all her mom—but she is slightly in love with Brick. Or in lust. Is there a difference? Sissy doesn’t care. He’s gorgeous.
“Anyway, I feel bad I had to throw your mom’s cell phone out the window, but how perfectly did that work out? I couldn’t have planned that if I tried. And my sleight-of-hand switch to make Otto think it was his?”
Sissy rolls her eyes again. “OK, David Blaine. What’s next—you’re going to make the Empire State Building disappear?”
“Maybe.” He grins and then claps once. “Now. Let’s finish what we started.” He turns to Tink. “You ready?”
Tink looks up from the rickety chair in front of the wooden desk that has been carved with expected graffiti by pen tips and markers. “I was born ready.” She laces her fingers together and stretches her arms out, cracking her knuckles, then flips open her laptop, types in her password, navigates to the screen she needs, and looks at Brick. “You’re on.”
Sissy sits primly on the bed, the adrenaline she thought had worked its way out of her system starting to pump through her veins again, causing her teeth to chatter a bit. What if it doesn’t work? What if all of this was for nothing?
Brick grabs the burner phone he purchased yesterday off the nightstand, pushing the numbers he had memorized for this exact occasion. He puts the audio on speaker mode and holds the phone out, so Sissy and Tink can hear. The line rings twice and then a voice says: “Thank you for being a Signal Mobile’s preferred customer. You’ve reached our twenty-four-hour concierge help line. This is Samantha. With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
Sissy knows Brick is barely suppressing an eye roll. He can’t stand the trappings of wealth, the privileges it buys. Everyone else has to abide by the nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday customer service hours—unless you have money. Though he can’t be too irritated, Sissy reasons. In this case, it’s working out in his favor. Brick takes a deep breath, and Sissy does, too. This is the moment of truth.
“Yes, this is Devon Wang,” Brick says in a voice an octave higher than his regular tone. He speaks in a rush to signify urgency, which isn’t hard. “I’m the assistant to Otto St. Clair, and his phone was destroyed this evening in an… incident .” He waits a beat for his implication—that it was somehow the fault of Otto’s temper and he is kindly covering for his erratic boss—to sink in. “Fortunately, the SIM card is undamaged and Mr.St. Clair would like it transferred into a new device yesterday, if you get my meaning. I’m sure you’re aware business never sleeps at SierraX.” Brick offers a nervous laugh and Sissy raises an amused eyebrow at him.
“Yes, I’m sure that’s true,” Samantha says solemnly. “First, let me say I’m so sorry for the inconvenience of the phone being damaged, and we can absolutely get Mr.St. Clair’s SIM card set up in a new device. I assume you have the new device with you?”
“I do.”
“Great. And for security purposes, do you happen to know Mr.St. Clair’s birthdate and email address?”
“Sure. Birthdate is four fourteen seventy-one, and his email is Otto Saint—that’s just S T , no periods—Clair at Sierra X dot com.”
“Perfect. Now, I see here on his account we have a two-factor security authentication, so I am going to need to speak with Mr.St. Clair directly. Is he available?”
“Of course. Please hold one moment.”
Brick hands the phone to Tink and mouths, Ready?
She nods, and with one hand deftly navigates her mouse on the screen to the digitized and transcribed recording, and with the other she holds the phone up to the laptop’s speaker. She clicks that mouse and Otto St. Clair’s voice rings out clear as a bell.
“Hello?”
“Mr.St. Clair? This is Samantha at Signal Mobile. How are you?”
Tink clicks another phrase on the screen. “Just lovely. And you?”
“Wonderful. I understand your cell phone has sustained some damage and you’d like to transfer the SIM card and activate it in a new device?”
Tink clicks: “That is correct.”
“For security purposes, can you please give me your voice authentication phrase?”
Sissy holds her breath. This is it. The moment that could make or break the months of planning—and for Brick, the culmination of years of dreaming about his revenge, about resetting the scales of justice. Tink clicks the mouse.
“One-One was a racehorse. Two-Two was one, too. When One-One won one race, Two-Two won one, too.”
Silence. Sissy and Brick lock eyes and the seconds tick by. Sissy’s shoulders begin to drop, and she thinks maybe their luck has run out. It’s possible—even likely—Otto chose a different phrase for his voice authentication. Finally, Samantha speaks.
“Thank you so much, Mr.St. Clair. We can proceed with the SIM card activation in your new device.”
Sissy’s eyebrows go skyward, her mouth opening in a silent scream, while Brick thrusts a silent punch into the air with his right hand. Tink just grins, handing the phone back to Brick. He leans into the mouthpiece. “This is Devon again. Did you get everything you needed?”
“Yes. If you have the new device on hand, please remove the back and read me the serial number and we’ll get Mr.St. Clair’s new phone set up right away.”
“Wonderful,” Brick says.
Five minutes later, he’s off the phone with Samantha and Signal Mobile and the new cell phone screen glows in the dimly lit room, lighting up his face like gold in a treasure chest.
Sissy smiles and collapses, throwing her back onto the mattress. It’s all downhill from here. She doesn’t have to watch Brick to know he’s navigating to the Ottobyte app, where he will click “Forgot Password” on the login page and seconds later his—well, Otto’s —text message notification will ding (there it is!) with a new security code to reset the password. Brick will input the code and suddenly be in Otto St. Clair’s crypto app as easily as a fox in the henhouse. She knows exactly what he’s doing, because the plan was her idea.
“How much?” Sissy asks. Brick doesn’t answer right away. He stares at the phone in a moment of reverence.
“How much?” Sissy prods.
“Two thousand seven hundred and fifty Ottobytes,” Brick says slowly.
It’s the largest-held jackpot of the most popular—and now hottest—cryptocurrency on the market, having just overtaken Bitcoin yesterday. Sissy quickly does the calculation in her head—at $38,000 per Ottobyte—$100 million, give or take.
And then Brick promptly drains all of it, transferring it to the account Tink set up a few weeks earlier. “You’re up,” he says to Tink, who nods and begins navigating to their account, where she will transfer the Ottobytes to another anonymous crypto wallet, using a VPN to hide the IP—and continue to do so, bolstering its untraceability with each transaction. And then they’ll sell it off a few coins at a time to the many eagerly waiting buyers until Brick has one hundred million real dollars. Sissy listens with great satisfaction to the click-clack of Tink’s keystrokes for the next ten minutes until she finally turns around and says: “Done.”
Sissy slowly sits up, a little stunned that her plan worked out so well.
“Well, Goldie,” Brick says. “You definitely earned your nickname.”
“I guess I did,” she says, a little grin playing on her lips. And then, as quickly as it came, it disappears, as she knows this is the last time she’ll see Brick.
“Do you have all your documents?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe somewhere tropical.”
“Be careful,” she says.
“Aw, you don’t have to worry about me. What about you? What are you going to do with that big brain of yours?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Sarah,” he says, and the way he says her real name takes her breath for a second. “You should go to Stanford. You could do so much good in the world.”
“I already have.”
“I know.” He grins. “But legally.”
She grins back. If nothing else, it would make her mother happy. And maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world. “Maybe I will.”