Cyber Genius (3 page)

Another scenario—I didn’t know how likely— was that someone
at the State Department had been smart enough to blame disappearing data on an
operating system malfunction and not an attack from North Korea. They would
have come down hard on Stiles.

Either way, I didn’t like the coincidence of MacroWare
learning of a huge security breach a day and a half before five of its
executives were poisoned—but
food
poisoning? That didn’t even begin to make sense. Stiles and company would be up
and whupping ass in twenty-four hours.

So someone wanted them out of the way for a day?

My mind kept replaying the image of Graham entering the
building where Stiles and company had been poisoned. That had been Wednesday. Today
was Friday. I had no idea what he was doing at any given time, so I couldn’t
say where he’d been that day.

I wanted to trust a man who had helped rescue my sisters.
But I knew our mysterious landlord was nose-deep in political guano that was
well over my head. I was almost afraid to show Tudor to a room in the mansion.
Maybe I should have hidden him in a hotel.

But Tudor was clearly exhausted, and I didn’t know any cheap
hotels. I dumped him in one of the spare second floor bedrooms, then headed to
the backyard to call my brother Nick, out of range of Graham’s hearing. I
needed to know what Nick had wanted me to see on the news.

I hoped Graham hadn’t bugged the arbor. It was danged cold
with the wind tossing the gnarled vines, but I didn’t trust my basement office
to be unbugged. There had been a time when I’d mistakenly thought Graham was a
cripple who couldn’t infiltrate my private space. I’d been wrong too often about
that man to take any chances.

Nick answered at once. “Was that him?” he asked without
preamble.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “Was what whom?” I
asked, stalling. I knew what he was asking.

“Graham!” he said impatiently. “You’ve seen him. I haven’t.
We’re monitoring the Stiles situation. The ambassador’s security staff swears
that was Amadeus Graham entering the building on Wednesday, the day of the
conference. Was it?”

“What difference does it make?” Since I promise my clients
privacy, I couldn’t tell Nick anything until Graham gave the go-ahead. “I’m
pretty certain he didn’t cook their food! What’s this really about?” I started
running my hands over the arbor posts, looking for anything that might be
picking up my voice or my cell signal.

“The ambassador thinks Graham’s been running a secret security
operation for years, spying on the embassy and who knows who else. They want
proof that he’s not only alive, despite reports otherwise, but that he’s not
the broken cripple everyone else assumes.”

I snorted. At least I wasn’t the only one he’d hoodwinked.
Amadeus Graham had deceived the entire world, including top notch, high-tech
security staff of powerful governments, into thinking he’d died or retired
after he was injured during 9/11. No wonder I sometimes liked the alpha jerk,
or at least respected his hermit tendencies.

“Why ask me? I am not proof that Graham exists,” I retorted.
“Are they trying to prove he’s incompetent at safeguarding his clients?” And
since Tudor had only just told me about his faux pas, I assumed Nick and the
Brit embassy knew nothing about MacroWare’s possible software problem. It was
the food poisoning they were focused on—why? I really shouldn’t have the
suspicions I did, so I added jokingly, “Was Graham supposed to be a taste
tester?”

Nick sighed in exasperation. “Do you want me to advance in
my job or not? Inside info is my reason for existence.”

I knew that. I adored Nick. He was the closest sibling to me
in age, and we’d grown up together in the rough streets of a dozen foreign slums.
He’d survived, gone on to Brit public schools with his dual citizenship, and
wasted his education gambling for a living while chasing male tail. But now
that we had a place to stay, of sorts, and EG to look after, he was settling
down. He had a good job as an aide in the British embassy and had just leased a
new apartment so he could take his boyfriends home.

I owed Graham some loyalty. I owed Nick more. “You don’t
really think the ambassador hired you because you were living in Graham’s
house, do you?” I asked. Nick has a few self-esteem problems to sort out.

“Yeah, I really think that’s part of the equation,” he
agreed sullenly.

“Then they’re full of crap and you deserve better. If I tell
you it looked like Graham, and I have no idea where he was on Wednesday, what
happens?” I’d have to look at my computer to remember where
I’d
been two days ago.

“Nothing happens at this point, except speculation on what MacroWare
will do now that its entire executive staff is dead or incapacitated. The
market is likely to follow MacroWare down soon unless the company shows someone
powerful—or someone with powerful connections—is in charge. According to the
staff, Graham was once considered a world-class technical and security wonk
with massive political clout. If it can be verified that he is actually alive
and possibly taking over the company, the whole world would sit up and take
notice. There isn’t any chance that he might be in line for an executive
position, is there? He wouldn’t break secrecy for anything less, would he?”

In panic, I pushed aside the hilarious scenario of reclusive
Graham leading a public corporation and focused on what mattered most. “Dead?”
I asked. “Of
food
poisoning? I
thought all they needed was their stomachs pumped.”

I clung to an arbor post and tried not to let my suspicious
mind take over, but I’d seen too much in too few years. What would be the point
of killing execs over a stupid software problem? CEOs couldn’t solve anything.

The food poisoning had to be accidental. The faulty
operating system and Tudor’s warning... totally coincidental. Unfortunately, my
spy mother had taught me how the bad guys made things look coincidental.

“Stiles and one of the other execs is dead,” Nick said. “Three
are in comas, on life support after they quit breathing. The dead pair
apparently ate more of the
fugu chiri
than the others. Theirs was the only table that requested the soup, probably
the only table that was granted special requests. The chef is being
interrogated, but puffer fish is inherently poisonous. If the chef wasn’t
trained in preparing it—” He let the sentence trail off with a shrug I could
almost hear.

Remembering Tudor’s idolization of Stiles, I grimaced and
rubbed my temple. A philanthropist and geek genius deserved better than puffer
fish poisoning, although if his goal had been to get high on the toxins, maybe
he deserved to be slowly paralyzed from the feet up for consuming one of the
most lethal poisons in nature. But well-prepared puffer fish was a perfectly
safe gourmet delicacy.

With a sigh, I gave Nick as much as I honestly could. “As
far as I’m aware, Graham has been in his office all week, but he comes and goes
as he pleases without telling me. It looked like Graham in the video, but I was
in a hurry and only caught a glimpse. We were at the airport picking up Tudor.
We have more problems than Graham. We need a family confab somewhere safe.”

Nick practically growled in irritation. He knew I wouldn’t
call a meeting unless it was important. “Patra won’t have time to make it,” was
all he said.

“We’ll leave it to you to pass on the info to her. I just
need to talk somewhere safe, which isn’t here. Tudor has major news, not all of
it good, and some of it possibly related to Stiles.” That was an
understatement, but I wasn’t trusting cell phone waves.

“Okay, tonight, about seven.” He named a restaurant half way
between our places.

I didn’t want to drag EG into this, but it was Friday, she
didn’t have school tomorrow, and she’d want to be part of any family gathering.
I was rapidly learning the problems my mother faced when raising a herd of
small children while spying on enemies. I didn’t have a mini-me to leave EG
with, as my mother had, and even at nine EG was too smart to be fobbed off for
long. She’d just investigate on her own if we didn’t tell her what was
happening. I had been just like her at that age.

I agreed on the restaurant and clicked off, then stared up
at the towering fortress I wanted for my own more than I wanted anything else
in the world. I hadn’t been entirely truthful about saving our funds for
college. I was hoping we could buy our house back from Graham if the lawsuits
didn’t work.

I had never owned more than my computer. I despised our
nomadic life while growing up. I longed for a solid foundation for EG to thrive
on.

I was terrified that my mother was right, and we needed to
keep moving to be safe. The world is not kind to people who are different, and
my family of weird prodigies couldn’t get any more different. We couldn’t cook
or clean but we all excelled in trouble.

***

Chilled to the bone and shivering after talking with Nick,
I crept down the stairs into the warm cellar where Mallard, Graham’s butler/spy,
resided. Heavenly smells drifted from the kitchen. For all I knew, he was
cooking puffer fish soup.

That Graham had the ability to serve poison soup, I had no
doubt. I wanted to believe he wouldn’t do it unless the victims were intent on
violent
world domination. MacroWare had
already managed commercial domination, so that horse was done gone, as my pappy
never said.

Besides, it still wasn’t proven that the poisoning hadn’t
been anything except pointlessly accidental.

I hurried down the tiled corridor to my office on the front
side of the basement. We’d moved here in the heat of summer. At the time, my
office had stayed blessedly cool. I liked rooms insulated by earth.

But I needed a space heater to get warm today. I turned it
on and rubbed my hands together, trying to warm them up enough to tackle my
keyboard.

“Upstairs,
now
,”
the intercom on my desk gargled abruptly.

Now that Nick had made me think about it, Graham had been
sending me documents to work on these last few days—so he’d been in his office—but
we hadn’t really talked.

Was it my imagination, or did he sound... weary?

Graham was grouchy 24/7.

I sat up and punched the intercom button. EG was right.
Intercoms were so yesterday. “Do I bring my sword or a king’s ransom?” I asked,
just because I hated being bossed around.

Graham
never
verbally invited me to his lair. Something was very wrong.

“I’ll have Mallard hogtie you and haul you up,” he
threatened, but it was half-hearted and not up to his usual standard of
intimidation.

Realizing this day wasn’t getting any better, I made my own
amusement. I popped an antihistamine—Graham had a cat and I’m allergic. Then I
scooted a chair beneath the trap door in my ceiling.

A few weeks ago, I’d discovered Graham’s treachery in
installing this secret passage. Now I used it to annoy him—and because it was
faster than following the elaborate winding public staircases to the third
floor.

Using muscles I’d worked on for years, I pulled myself
through my office ceiling into the closet of my grandfather’s master suite on
the first floor. Inside the closet were the hidden stairs that led directly up
to Graham’s office. An elevator would be more practical, but oh well—I needed
the exercise. I trotted up.

Graham’s office is a dark lair lined with computer monitors
that at any given time could be covering a war in the Mideast or an ice cream
truck in San Diego. Today, several screens showed the hospital where presumably
the Macro execs were being treated, plus newscasters commenting on the economic
effect of Stiles’ death. They were freaking out.

“Personally, I’d snap off the talking heads,” I said as I
studied the screens. “Are we wallowing in muck today?”

“We live in muck. The death of Stephen Stiles has sent the
markets plummeting. They’ll recover once the new product is released on
schedule,” he said angrily, punching his keyboard to bring up the stock market
reports. “They won’t recover so fast if they discover Stiles was murdered.”

There it was, the hammer I’d been waiting to fall.

Tudor’s Take:

Totally knackered but determined, Tudor dug through his
backpack for the used tablet computer he’d purchased from one of the profs.
He’d had to sell all his powerful equipment and empty his savings for the plane
ticket when everything went pear-shaped. The tablet had taken his last shilling.
He was stranded here at Ana’s mercy.

He’d been nervous about his reception but pretty certain she
would take him in. Beneath the tough exterior, his half-sister was a
marshmallow—she’d do anything for family. Unfortunately, that worked both ways.
If his cock-up threatened EG, Ana might take
him
down instead.

There were bound to be nasty repercussions if he’d fragged
the internet and Interpol showed up. His fingers shook so badly that he had to
try twice to hit settings and disconnect all the tracking devices on the
tablet.

He had to know how much damage he’d caused. His cookie monster
program was dodgy, but so was hacking. It wasn’t as if he’d
intended
to sell the program to anyone
but MacroWare as a cautionary security plug. Or maybe to an anti-virus
programmer if MacroWare wasn’t interested.

If he was really, really lucky, more experienced people had
patched the State Department’s operating system shambles before his worm
crawled deeper. He held his breath as he tested for nearby Wi-Fi connections
and located a strong one.

The beastly tablet operated on a Peanut system, not MacroWare.
He wasn’t as familiar with Peanut’s programming, but the basics weren’t too
different. The strong signal was password protected, of course. That would be
here in the house. He bit his lip and anxiously tried a few basic passwords.