Identity Theft, Chapter 17

17.
The Player and the Game

Jack ran out of Stacey’s room at top speed, heading for the bathroom, the precious slip of paper with her staff account information clutched tightly in one hand. She ran flat-out, as though pursued by the natives of a world with too many suns and too much darkness. She still almost didn’t make it.

It was only when she was already heaving that the full weight of the déjà vu settled on her. Weeks ago, after her first group therapy session, she’d flung herself into this very same stall. Then she’d been struggling to make people believe the truth about Riddick. Now… lies. She’d been telling horrible, nauseating lies that had driven what was left of her breakfast right back out of her.

If he knew what I’d said, he’d hate me so much…

It was over, she realized, as she forced herself to her shaky feet. Whatever chance she’d had of one day meeting Riddick again, renewing their friendship, indulging her fantasies… was over. She’d never be able to look him in the eye, not after betraying him like this. Even if he never knew, she would. She’d destroyed it, all of it. There was nothing left; nothing more. Richard B. Riddick was out of her reach forever, and she’d never have the right to look for him.

Jack had betrayed him. Jack had to die. Audrey would leave here and resume her life, but Jack had no right to live on anymore, within or without.

But first, she had to get out of this place.

Stacy’s door was still closed when she left the bathroom. She tried not to think about what Stacy was doing behind that door, let alone what the vicious girl was imagining as she did it. Instead, she walked resolutely back to the library and the vacant terminals.

It had felt like she had been talking forever, but the clocks said it hadn’t been all that long. Lunch was still two hours away. She could hear the sounds of a popular movie playing in the main recreation area. She recognized the opening credits theme and knew it was one almost everybody had been waiting to see. Abu and Lajjun, still trying to pull her out of her downward spiral, had taken her to it during its first week in theaters, a scant week before she cut her wrists.

The library would probably be deserted. Maybe she could get her ass covered even before lunch.

Carmouche had gone off-duty and been replaced by an orderly that Jack didn’t recognize. That wasn’t ideal. The woman was tall, slender but muscled, her medium-brown hair tied back. She was reading one of the old, thick, Victoria Holt novels from old Earth and seemed absorbed in the text, but her posture reminded Jack somehow of Riddick at rest: contained peril that could burst forth at any moment. Jack wondered if the orderly normally worked on D Ward. Most of her nametag was blocked by the book she held, but it ended with “-AN.”

Pretending to ignore the orderly, Jack walked over to the terminals as calmly and resolutely as she could — act like you belong and people will believe you belong — waiting to be challenged, but she wasn’t. Either the orderly bought the act or just didn’t care either way.

Then again, everybody on the staff seemed to think they had all of their patients sandboxed on the computers. The truth was anything but.

Whatever else could be said about her, Stacy had come through. The login worked. Even better, as the staff menu opened up, Jack recognized its layout immediately.

Her father had helped design it. He’d shown her how it worked. And best of all, she still remembered the law enforcement override that he had helped build into it. Any law enforcement agency that had the command on file could get in. She could get in. On a level that the other girls had no idea existed.

I might not even have to wait to make my move until I leave C ward, she thought with shaky amazement.

Before she did anything else, though, she needed to make sure that she had control of the Celia situation. Stacy would be preoccupied for a little while longer… she hoped… and that would give her enough time to make sure that neither she — nor any of the other Killers Club girls with purloined admin accounts — could ever find out that it was Jack’s intel that had led to the girl’s transfer.

Snitches get stitches, she reminded herself. Those would be hard for Audrey to explain.

She pulled up the transfer notice and read it carefully. No signs of her handiwork there. Next, however, was Celia’s file.

There it was.

Based on confidential information from a fellow patient, we now know that Celia has been targeted for group bullying by a clique in the C ward nicknamed the “Killer’s Club.” Given her relatively clean record and overall progress, we are moving her to B ward to ensure her safety.

That wouldn’t do at all. Only members of the Killer’s Club had been in the room when Stacy revealed her plan, and only Jack was an unknown quantity to them. If any of them read it, it would be instantly obvious that the patient in question was her.

Let’s just fix that, shall we?

Jack rewrote the paragraph, changing the wording carefully so that it would still sound like something an adult, a professional, had written. Finally she was satisfied.

Based on similar prior incidents, we believe that Celia has been targeted for group bullying, possibly by a clique in the C ward nicknamed the “Killer’s Club.” Given her relatively clean record and overall progress, we are moving her to B ward to ensure her safety.

That, she finally thought with a sigh, was as good as she could make it. Now she just needed to make sure there were no handles in her own record… and do a little sanitizing of any information that could be used to track her once she bugged out.

Her record still listed her as Jane Doe 7439. That was a good sign. If they were trying to pin her identity down, nothing had come back yet. She moved to the most recent entries in her chart first. Would they have mentioned the incident?

Damn. Of course they did. And they have no idea how porous their system is…

Not that the code was porous, of course. Her father didn’t do bad work. It wasn’t his fault that one of the orderlies had been so lax about security, or that none of the features to detect and prevent that kind of breach that had been enabled. And she might just clean up a few more things once she launched the law enforcement back door.

But first, there was an entry to fix — and carefully — before any of the Killer’s Club girls thought to take a look.

In spite of the fact that Miss Doe was the first to get into a fight with Celia Wyndham, she has obliquely expressed remorse for the act by warning us that Miss Wyndham is now the target of systematic bullying. The previous concerns about her closer association with the Killer’s Club may be unfounded.

She definitely couldn’t risk any of the girls seeing that.

It took her almost a half hour, and a dozen unsatisfactory attempts, to find wording that would work. Not far off, she could hear the movie getting more and more car-chase and explosion heavy. Although few girls ventured into the library at any time, she couldn’t risk any of Stacy’s friends looking over her shoulder while she worked on this. Satisfied at last, she saved the new paragraph.

Miss Doe’s instigation of the systematic bullying of Celia Wyndham seems to confirm our previous concerns about her growing association with the Killer’s Club. She should be monitored closely for any signs of remorse for her actions.

Much better, she thought. Now she was the Killer’s Club’s newest accomplice, not their snitch.

She read through the rest of her record carefully, looking for any notes that could potentially connect her to Audrey MacNamera once she went on the run. Someone had identified her accent as common to Deckard’s World. She deleted the line and found three more references to Deckard’s World — all speculative, but still — that needed to be deleted as well. The movie ended as she saved and closed Jane Doe 7439’s files. Nobody had come in yet; the orderly who had taken over from Carmouche appeared to be engrossed in her Victoria Holt novel and happy to ignore her.

Perfect.

Backing out to the administrative main menu, she launched the special login for law enforcement, holding her breath until its distinctive menu appeared. Now for the important moves.

She changed her staff account so that it was top-tier, with access to everything, and checked that the other Killer’s Club accounts — easy to identify now that she could see who had created each account — had been on the same tier that her own had been. She was relieved to see that none of them would have had greater clearance than she had; she didn’t need to dig back into her file, or Celia’s, to make sure that she hadn’t missed anything she hadn’t had access to. When it suddenly occurred to her to check Stacy’s file for references to her, she was relieved to see that there were none.

She only got to spend a few more minutes poking around on the law enforcement level, gleaning passcodes and information about lockdown systems, before she heard voices approaching. Her screen was back to normal — the screen of an ordinary patient — before Xi Hin and Omphalé walked in.

She suppressed a sigh of relief.

“Hey, Jack,” Xi Hin said, her voice very nearly friendly. “You haven’t seen a certain drama queen around, have you?”

Jack glanced nervously at the orderly, who was continuing to ignore them. The woman turned another page in her novel, seemingly oblivious to their conversation. Or she’s really good at pretending not to listen…

She decided to at least pretend to go with the latter.

Making her glance at the orderly a little more obvious, Jack motioned Xi Hin and Omphalé to move further away from the front desk with her. Both girls looked intrigued as they followed her.

“She’s gone,” she whispered, once she was sure that even an astute eavesdropper would be out of range.

“Gone?” Xi Hin blurted. Omphalé shushed her. “What do you mean, gone?” she continued in a whisper. “It’s my turn to—”

That earned her another shushing from Omphalé.

“Stacy told me earlier,” Jack whispered, glad that she didn’t have to be the originator of the news. “Sent up to B Ward.”

“Why?” Omphalé whispered, her expression shocked. Stacy had been enraged, but Omphalé just seemed confused. The plans for tormenting the girl had probably just been a diversion to her, and not the serious business they’d become for Stacy.

Jack shrugged. It was better not to leave too many handles out by knowing too much. “That’s what she wanted to know, too.”

Xi Hin turned and sat down at the nearest terminal — Jack’s — and logged her out before logging into her staff account. After a moment, she swore. “They figured us out, looks like. Sounds like Stacy’s not the first one to play that game here.”

Omphalé gave Jack an askance look and whispered something to Xi Hin, who started typing up a new query.

Bet I know what they’re going to check…

Omphalé’s amused snort confirmed it. “They say you instigated it all, Jack. Stacy’s gonna be pissed that you’re getting all the credit.”

Jack walked over and read the doctored passage over Xi Hin’s other shoulder, taking her time before reacting. Let them think she was a slowish reader. Let them think she’d never read that paragraph before, much less written most of it. “Looks to me like that’s blame I’m getting, not credit.”

“Po-tay-toe, Po-tah-toe.”

Inwardly, part of her wanted to curl into a ball and shiver for hours. She had come dangerously close to earning the lifelong enmity of the cruelest and most brutal girls in the ward. If Stacy had decided to dig into the reasons for Celia’s transfer before hearing Jack’s story, or if the other Killer’s Club girls hadn’t been distracted by an action movie…

I’d be in pieces, or maybe just in D Ward… and I’d never get out of here.

“You okay?”

She glanced over at both girls. “Yeah, sorry. I, uh… told Stacy some stuff she wanted to know about… uh… Riddick… and…”

She swallowed. Thinking about that recitation in Stacy’s room made her feel ill and guilty all over again. No faking needed.

The girls’ faces were almost sympathetic.

“Hey,” Xi Hin said after a moment. “I bet the therapists’d say it’s good you’re facing that stuff head-on. You know, admitting the truth.”

She and Omphalé nodded at each other with the sage expressions of old veterans at therapy.

“I guess,” she replied, and the lunch bell rang.

Food had no appeal to Jack. She sat quietly at the table, picking at the unappetizing contents of her plate, while conversation flowed around her. She avoided even glancing in Stacy’s direction. It was hard to look Kyra’s way, either. Those had been her ordeals she’d been describing. She just hoped that Kyra was right about Stacy, and that the stories would never spread. Having Riddick’s reputation tarnished with Red Roger’s crimes on Canaan Mountain would be a disaster.

I need more time in the system, she thought to herself. The sooner she could get out of this place, the better, before even more of her soul was compromised. She needed codes. She needed to sanitize Kyra’s records, too, so that her friend would also be harder to trace. There were a thousand moving parts and she needed to line all of them up—

Everyone was getting up. The meal was over.

“I’d ask how it went, but I guess I know,” murmured Kyra as they rose. “You okay?”

Jack looked over at Kyra, wishing she had even half the armor and aplomb the older girl possessed. Knowing what she had endured just made her all the more impressive.

I have to get her out of here.

“I will be,” she managed after a moment. “I need to get more time on the library terminals. Can you cover for me? Keep people from wondering what I’m up to?”

Kyra nodded, although she seemed to be wondering why it was so important. When the other girls in the Killer’s Club headed for the recreation room, she kept them distracted while Jack slipped away.

The romance novel enthusiast was still on duty in the library. Jack picked a different workspace, selecting a table with two terminals facing away from both the duty desk and the entry. On one, she began leading a set of false trails, using her patient account to browse pages that related to interests she’d never had as Audrey MacNamera. On the other, she logged in to her improved, highest level staff account and made some further changes to her patient record, deleting entries about her prior browsing history and the subjects she’d pursued. In their place, she added records connected to the new sites she was browsing. Jane Doe 7439, she had decided, liked to read about neo-Cajun cuisine, watched New Creole cooking shows, liked to listen to zydeco music, and never made anything above a B- on her schooling modules.

While another cooking show started on the terminal beside her, she switched over to the law enforcement account and began setting up a master passcode that would let her go through all of the facility’s doors… undetected. Via Ghost Mode.

“They don’t understand what they’re asking for,” John MacNamera had groused at her two years ago, leaning back on his couch and blowing out a frustrated breath. “This ‘Ghost Mode’ is going to blow up in their faces one day.”

Audrey had sat quietly. Her father would explain without her asking. He always did. She had glanced down at the specs he was working with. There it was: Ghost Mode. She scanned over the instructions for using it, filing them away in her memory.

It was very fortunate that nobody in the hospital had any idea just how good her memory was.

“Eidetic” was the term her mother used with her. She only had to read things once to remember them clearly and precisely. And her mother had sternly explained, after she got into a fight with one of her cousins about which of them was remembering an event “right,” that what she could do was extremely rare, a gift that she hadn’t done anything to earn, and that it was rude to show it off and unkind to expect others to have it.

Which, fortunately, meant that long before she left Deckard’s World and began her run, she had become an old hand in concealing the full extent of her knowledge and recall. Nobody expected a kid to remember everything, down to the tiniest detail, so nobody — except possibly her parents — ever realized that she was faking it when she got less-than-perfect marks on a quiz or test, or claimed not to remember something that had happened when she was three.

Now, however, sitting at the terminal, she could still see the instructions for “Ghost Gode” in her memory, and still hear her father grumbling about the mistake the security firm was making.

“When this mode is attached to a security code, no records are generated when the code is used,” he’d explained after a moment. “Sure, that’s great for a situation where you think someone high up is compromised and you don’t want them to know they’re being investigated, or the police are on the way… but I can think of a million ways it could be abused.”

“What are you going to do?” Audrey had asked him.

“I can’t take it out. We can’t have one package for clients who want Ghost Mode and another for clients who don’t. The code’s too integral.” Her father had sighed. “But we can make two sets of documentation. Only the clients who request Ghost Mode will get instructions on how to enable it.”

But it was always there, asked for or not, enabled or not. Now Jack keyed in the instructions for making her newly-minted security codes “Ghost Mode,” hiding them from the general administrative registry as well. She’d chosen a number combination that no one else used. Now it would open any door on any of the floors and there would be no record that the doors had opened at all.

Sure, she could have gone through the doors using any combination of the administrators’ passcodes — they were all in her head now — but this code had a further advantage: she could share it with Kyra, and her friend would only need to remember one number.

She spent the next hour — while a middle-aged woman, on the screen next to her, quietly droned on about the best jambalaya recipes — studying the camera layouts and timing on the stairs between C Ward and A Ward, and the layout of the ground level. She had the escape route picked, the timing worked out, and everything memorized when she heard voices approaching. By the time four girls entered the library, she seemed to be doing poorly on an algebra quiz while listening to singers from centuries earlier admonish listeners: “Don’t Mess With My Toot-Toot.” She got a few funny looks, but nobody seemed to suspect anything.

They’d never heard her listen to music before. They’d never know that she listened to anything but zydeco. Now, though, there would be witnesses to the fact that this was Jane Doe 7439’s music of choice. Everything in her record would point to a colony on the opposite side of the Helion system from Deckard’s World.

We can leave whenever we want, she reassured herself. As soon as I clean up Kyra’s records so she’s harder to trace.

That, she decided, would be her next stop once she was alone again.

Score one for zydeco music. The girls, muttering about how weird she was, left quickly with their books. Once they were gone, she logged back in as a top admin and got back to work. She opened up Kyra’s file—

Oh. Shit.

A cold chill flowed down her back. Her fingers shook as she typed. She didn’t dare change much — the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain was, after all, the facility’s closest thing to a celebrity patient — but she changed what she could.

This was bad. This was very… very bad.

Her decision made, she switched over to the duty rosters and made subtle adjustments that would ensure a nice, wide open gap in coverage, all along her planned escape route, between 2 and 3 am. Scrolling through the daytime duty roster, she found the anomaly she was looking for. She switched back over to the law enforcement account and looked at the orderly’s records again.

It was even worse than she had thought.

Fuck. She glanced up at the seemingly-oblivious woman at the front desk, wondering whether she was just killing time or paying closer attention to everything than it seemed.

It wouldn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. She couldn’t let it matter.

She shut down the terminals when the dinner bell rang, and walked out of the library as calmly as she could, trying not to let it be too obvious that her skin was trying to crawl right off of her body.

She forced herself to eat her entire dinner. It was dry and tasteless in her mouth, and most of her attention was spent on keeping it down. From the few comments she could make herself focus on, everybody thought she was still out of sorts from her morning conversation with Stacy. She squirreled away a few rolls when nobody was looking.

For later.

The woman was gone when she returned to the library, replaced by one of the regular evening-duty orderlies. Jack felt a tiny amount of the tension leave her spine as she worked. It only took her another two hours to get everything in place. Her hands shook a little as she shut down the terminal, spent a few minutes pretending to be a germaphobe and wiping down all of the terminals she had used that day, and left the library.

Normally she showered in the morning, but she felt like she stank of fear. After a quick shower, she killed time cleaning the room she and Kyra shared, wiping down every surface that she might have touched at any point. Would anybody bother dusting for fingerprints? She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t want to risk it. While she waited for Kyra to return for Lights Out, she ran over the plan again and again in her mind, rehearsing each step of the way, each possible complication.

It would work. It had to.

Finally Kyra arrived, saying goodnight to Collette and Xi Hin before she entered their room.

“You’ve been the talk of the Club,” she said with a wry grin. “Not that Stacy’s sharing the story you told, thank God, but it bought you some legit cred. Especially with you being the insti—”

“Don’t let anybody give you meds tonight. If they do, fake swallowing them. Spit them out when nobody’s looking.”

“Okay…?”

Jack walked up to Kyra, getting close enough that she could breathe the next words and her friend would still hear them, but nobody else possibly could. “We’re leaving tonight.”

Kyra went still, staring at her in surprise and wonder. “Tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?” It was to her credit that she didn’t even ask how, given that Jack had previously said they needed to get to A Ward first.

“There’s a transfer order in for you. For tomorrow at noon.”

“What?” Kyra whisper-hissed in astonishment.

“Somebody decided you’re well enough to stand trial. They’re shipping you back to New Dartmouth. And the mercenary in charge of taking you there is already here, pretending to be an orderly.”

“But—”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re going tonight. 2 am. Don’t go to sleep.”

Someone knocked on the door.

As if controlled by the same set of puppet strings, Kyra and Jack retreated to their beds in tandem. “Come in!” Jack called.

The Victoria Holt-reading orderly stood in the doorway. Her name tag, no longer obscured, confirmed everything Jack had already learned about her.

E. Logan

They didn’t even bother giving her a fake name…

The false orderly, a woman Jack now knew was really named Eve Logan, professional bounty hunter, entered the room with a smile that was just a hair too wide to be authentic, carrying a tray with pills on it. “Time for bed, girls!”

Neither one of them were normally scheduled for bedtime sedation. Their eyes met for the briefest moment. Then Kyra was all smiles, reaching for the cup the merc was offering her.

Jack accepted hers, fumbling the cup long enough to keep Logan from noticing that Kyra was pocketing her pills instead of putting them in her mouth. She was glad that her cousin had gone through a “close-up magic” kick and had insisted on teaching her several variations of the Vanishing Quarter. Eve Logan left a moment later, undoubtedly convinced that both girls would soon be sedated heavily enough that neither one would be up before noon.

Kyra gave her a haunted look as the lights were lowered. Jack nodded. She had set a timer in the system. The lights would come partway back up at 2 am exactly, right as their door unlocked and all of the orderlies would have assignments to be nowhere nearby. Eve Logan, she knew, would be asleep in the administrative guest building by then; if she woke up for any reason, she’d find her door and comms mysteriously locked and unresponsive until daybreak.

Glancing over at Kyra, barely visible in the dark, Jack had a feeling that both of them would still be wide awake when the lights came up.