Cyber Genius

by Patricia Rice

  I showered and grabbed a hotel robe. When Graham staggered into the bathroom looking gloriously rumpled, unshaven, and way too tempting for my own good, I sashayed back to the bedroom. While the water ran, I hunted through his drawers and stole one of the black t-shirts he must buy by the dozen. It fell nearly to the hem of my skirt, but that was okay. I was aiming for grungy.

  I braided my hair into two plaits and wrapped them around my head, pinning them close to my scalp. My stockings had a run, but I needed them to go with the sensible but despised pumps. Grumbling about women who let fashion dictate misery, I shook the dust from my suit jacket. At this hour of the afternoon, it would be too cold to go without it.

  Graham stalked out wrapped in a heavy white hotel robe. I nearly melted all over again. Just imagine every square-jawed, steely-eyed, rugged movie star you’d ever admired rolled into one whiskery grouchy hunk... And I happened to know he cleaned up well too.

  “Meaningless sex,” I informed him before he could say something even nastier. “I needed that. So did you. Discussion over.”

  “Adrenalin rush,” he agreed, eyeing my outfit with displeasure.

  While he was grudgingly communicating... “Adam Herkness referred to you as Day. Does he know your full name? Will he give it to the feds?” I opened my attaché and produced a black knit hat and gloves. So, Tudor wasn’t the only nerd around.

  “Stiles and I went back a few decades. He knew my name. Herkness heard him call me Day. He’s a salesman. He remembers names. I don’t know if Stiles told him more, which is why I’m here. Did you call Sean?”

  “Sean wants a news story. So does Patra. How much are you prepared to give them?” I dug out my phone and scrolled to Sean’s name.

  “Not my name,” Graham said dryly.

  “He already knows that. And he won’t buy the empty attic if I show it to him, although the cops might. But I’m talking about the flawed operating system. You told the cops to keep it undercover, but it can’t be a secret much longer now that the sheep are bleating about the destroyed NSA files.”

  He ran a hand over his scruffy jaw. “It’s a national security issue. Sean will need to confirm it with other sources. Go ahead, but tell him to keep the sensation down low until the facts are substantiated—which they aren’t at this point.”

  I hate voice mail so I texted Sean to see if he was available. “All right, but I’ll need a safe house for Maggie and her son until their new apartment is ready in January. I can ask Nick to move back in with us and let her have his place, I guess.” I was thinking out loud more than anything.

  “Tell Nick everything we know and have him pass it on to the British consulate,” Graham actually agreed without my twisting his arm. “His moving back in will be safer until the news is out there—if the killers were out to keep the OS flaw quiet. We still don’t know that for certain. Kita was gunned down by a hired assassin—not as well planned as Stiles’ death. I need to see if Hilda was killed by the same weapon, but that wasn’t a professional hit. Someone panicked.” He rummaged in a drawer and pulled out fresh boxers—black Calvin Klein knit, if I wasn’t mistaken. Yummy.

  I kissed his cheek and ran before he could drop his underwear and grab me. Too much of a good thing makes Ana a dull girl.

  Still feeling abraded and satiated from the unexpected sex, I hurried down the hushed corridor, pretending I had a clue of where I was going.

  Thank goodness, the elevator worked normally and didn’t take me into a Secret Service closet somewhere. I took it downstairs and hid my attaché under my suit jacket. My knit cap helped me blend in as I sauntered through the crowded lobby like any of the nervous, milling nerds, pretending to talk into my phone while not making eye contact.

  I carried Graham’s warmth and the memory of great sex into the cold November gray, still without a hint of what I meant to do. With the limo shepherding EG home from school, I headed for the nearest Metro.

  When he didn’t answer my text, I left a suggestive message on Sean’s voice mail, then called Patra. When I got her voice mail, too, I told her I was about to give Sean the scoop if she didn’t call right back. Then I pinged Nick to give him the bad news that he had to move home if we found Maggie.

  Nick always answers his phone, when he’s not in the depths of a bad love affair anyway. He chirped cheerily on the other end, so his love life was currently good.

  “Is your phone secure or do you need to call me back?” I asked, just to get his edge up.

  “This one’s safe,” he said, a little more warily. “Did you just blow up the Stiles’ memorial?”

  “Close. But apparently keeping secrets just got a woman killed, so I’m passing on ours. Graham still insists it’s a national security issue. If nothing else, if this news gets out, it will blow the hell out of MacroWare’s stock price and probably Wall Street, but you can pass on this much to your boss. Someone has programmed an opening into some, but not all, of MW’s new OS’s to make them easily hacked from the outside—that’s how the NSA’s files got deleted.”

  “Whoa, back-up, I’m not Tudor. How does that translate into simple English?”

  “Can’t make it any simpler. Some of MacroWare’s new trial operating systems have a built-in spyhole for anyone who knows how to find it. We don’t know who knows about it, besides us. Tudor’s cookie monster program found the flaw, he told Stiles, Stiles died, but we have no proof there’s a connection. Essentially, whoever knows about the security defect can go in and rummage around in any computer using the faulty software.”

  “And destroy the computer’s contents?” Nick asked in incredulity.

  “Presumably. Tudor did it accidentally,” I said with a casual shrug he couldn’t see. “We need to keep Tudor undercover in case they realize that. Besides Tudor, any hacker”—like me—“can potentially read the contents of the vulnerable hard drive, download anything they want, introduce Trojan horses, whatever.”

  Nick may not be technologically competent, but he knows how people behave. He added two and two pretty quickly. Actually, he was something of a card shark and could add the entire deck if necessary. He came back with a swift summary. “You think Stiles was killed to keep this flaw secret? So they can keep using it?”

  “They killed Stiles, and the guy who could repair it, and the chef who cooked the poison soup, and mother of the guy who sold all his MacroWare stock this week. But we can’t find the logic yet. The O/S hole will be discovered by others eventually, so the deaths may be a delaying tactic, however improbable that sounds.”

  He whistled. “The ambassador should give me a bonus for this.”

  I rolled my eyes at this selfish assessment. “You’ll have to earn my cooperation. I have a potential witness who needs a safe house. I’m nominating your apartment. You need to move back in with us until we get this nailed. Graham has left the building.”

  “A family confab is needed,” he said ominously. “We’ll talk later.”

  He hung up on me. I get that reaction a lot. I hopped the Metro heading home to EG. I really needed to make lists and do more research, if only Sean would call and tell me he could find Maggie.

  Sean rang back as I got caught in the rush hour crowd at Dupont. The elevators on the Metro were out of order, so I elbowed my way up the stairs as we spoke. I filled him in on everything we knew and gave him the national security spiel. He’s not dumb and could figure out the rest on his own. Then I gave him Maggie’s address.

  I was nearly breathless by the time I reached the top. I needed to find more time for exercise.

  “Maggie won’t believe me at this point,” I told him. “I don’t know if you can talk her to safety, but we’ve got Nick’s place lined up as a safe haven. It’s a first floor walk-up with a handicap ramp, so her kid can get in and out. I don’t know about schools. I’ll look into it if you can get her out of there. Detective Azzini knows guys who will help, if she needs persuasion.”

  Sean had met the good detective when we’d helped him bring
down the mob boss, so he knew who I was talking about. Sean asked a few pertinent questions so I could tell he was on top of the game. I spotted a black suit with a bulge under his coat out on the street, near our corner. Pulse escalating, I idled past in the crowd, holding the phone to my ear and tilting my face away.

  Hanging up on Sean so he could get to work, I debated the best angle to reach home. Without Graham there to monitor the situation, I had no way of knowing if there were feds on every corner and cops in every car.

  I needed to be in my basement, hooking my Whiz up to his security network so I could assess the extent of the problem. This was why Graham never left his lair. Paranoia required constant monitoring.

  I stopped and thought about that.

  Unlike Graham, I’d learned my lesson—I hoped. Paranoia was like hatred—more harmful to the person suffering from it than to the object. Besides, as I’d tried to tell Graham, we couldn’t protect everybody, all the time, and it wasn’t healthy if we tried.

  I’d be danged if I’d let a bunch of cops shove me back into my childhood defensive modes.

  Instead of defense, I opted for offense.

  I called Tudor. “You’re in charge of EG. She should be home shortly. Nick is on his way. I’m about to hunt an illegal immigrant. There are feds on the corner and probably more under every bush. Don’t go out. Hold the fort.”

  He growled something obscene. I didn’t listen. I was already circling the block, heading back to the Metro.

  Graham would have a cow.

  Eighteen

  Ana gives new meaning to Black Monday

  Late afternoon clouds dimmed the streets, and I shivered in the November cold. I needed my army jacket, not a damned suit coat. If I meant to kick myself out of my warm basement office, I ought to at least stash a closet elsewhere.

  I found a café with free wireless, ordered a large hot tea, and defrosted my hands enough to type. My attaché contained my trusty laptop. It wasn’t a sleek new model, but it had a huge processor and programs that blocked the idiots who sat around coffee shops, trying to hack my wireless.

  Really, sometimes the world is out to get you. Paranoia isn’t all wrong.

  I wanted to ask Graham to hunt Wilhelm’s address, but he’d roar like a wounded lion if he knew I hadn’t gone home. Understanding just how incompatible we were served to remind me that great sex was just that, nothing more. We each had our own separate neuroses and never the twain should meet.

  Now that I had Wilhelm’s last name—Vokovich—I had a little more to work on.

  He didn’t show up on any of the search engines I could access from this limited network. I needed Graham’s satellite connections. So I looked up Adolph’s address and proceeded under the assumption that Adolph and Wilhelm were getting it on in the same house.

  I took the Metro to Adolph’s upscale community. As I hit the street and checked my phone map, I noticed a Goldrich mortgage center on the corner. Recalling that company as high on the banking committee files I’d searched, I pondered connections as I hurried down rush-hour-jammed sidewalks.

  I knew that Tray Fontaine and Adam Herkness had mortgages on fancy houses that didn’t seem affordable given their high level of debt. Judging by this neighborhood, it looked as if Adolph was also living on a scale higher than his chef’s salary could command. I’d skimmed his HR file and could do the math. Kito had also been planning on moving into a high-end community, although it would just be his rent and not his mortgage that pushed his budget. How did these pieces fit together?

  Adolph’s posh condo had no yard, just a planter on the steps containing a skinny evergreen. Land is too expensive to buy more than one needs, and what city dweller had time for a lawn? But condos made life difficult for sneaky rats like me.

  I circled the block, looking for a rear entrance to the complex. I was shivering and about to consign this notion to the trash pile of stupid ideas when I encountered an automatic gate sliding open to allow in an Audi. In the fading daylight, the driver didn’t notice as I slipped through the closing gate behind her.

  Other than trapping myself in the parking lot behind the condos, I wasn’t certain what I’d just accomplished. I wore no disguise. Adolph and Wilhelm could easily recognize me, especially after I’d karate-chopped Wilhelm into submission. Great stupid idea, Ana.

  I was playing on the impression that Wilhelm had just lost his aunt, possibly his guardian angel in the world of illegal immigration. The police would want to question him. Had he slipped away before the cops found him? He had to be feeling trapped like me—and paranoid.

  In the interest of getting the heck out of the cold before I became an Ana-sicle, I dialed Adolph’s phone number. I stationed myself against the wall of his unit, beside his garage door, where no one could see me from above.

  On caller ID, my cell phone number would only show as unknown with a local area code, like almost everyone not in their address book. No harm trying.

  “Ya?” a male voice answered cautiously.

  I hadn’t heard Adolph speak a lot, but I knew he had been born and raised in this country and was unlikely to mock an accent.

  “Wilhelm Vokovich?” I asked in a voice of nasal authority. “This is Linda Lane in Human Resources. It has come to our attention that we do not have your green card on file. Immigration authorities are asking for your documents. I believe they are on their way to your home. If you could fax or scan—”

  “You have wrong number,” he shouted, then slammed the phone in my ear. Landline, nice. I missed the days of slamming phones.

  I occupied myself wondering where one bought a dial phone for slamming while I rearranged a few of those big rolling trash bins in front of Adolph’s garage door. While I was at it, I scouted the area for potential weapons. Workmen who left unlocked toolboxes behind—thinking this was a secure area—were my friends.

  This was by no means one of my better ideas, but I was freezing, and the exercise warmed me up.

  Ten minutes later, the garage door rolled up. By then, I’d created a reasonably impressive barrier blocking access to the drive behind the condo units.

  A Mercedes sports car backed out at high speed— and screeched to a halt upon hitting the first big plastic bin. Garbage bags flew out of the cans, over his trunk, and spewed chicken guts onto the blacktop. Little cars aren’t meant for crashing into tall objects, so the trunk looked a little worse for wear.

  I waited until Wilhelm leaped out, cursing, before I made my presence known.

  He visibly startled as I emerged from behind a neighbor’s patio trellis. Adolph’s new chef was a scarecrow figure of wild blond hair and towering skinniness. I’m a sturdy, tidy shrimp. But I’d brought him down once, and judging by his widening eyes, he hadn’t forgotten me.

  “You!” he said intelligently.

  “We need to talk,” I told him. “We can do it here or at the police station.”

  “You cannot make me!” He started to climb back into the car.

  From behind my back, I produced the hammer some poor workman had stupidly left at the end of the day. I sauntered to the front of the pretty Mercedes and swung the hammer dangerously near the headlights. “Does Adolph know you’re driving his baby? Do you even have a license? If the police catch you driving it, they can impound it.”

  I didn’t even know if it was Adolph’s car. I was lying as fast as my frozen tongue could flap. I’d never owned a car or a license, but I understood fear. I’d lived with it long enough.

  “What do you want?” he asked, obviously debating whether to run over me or the cans, and the risk to his relationship if he messed up his lover’s pricey toy.

  “My only agenda is to find who ordered Stiles killed,” I said reassuringly. “I assume the same person is responsible for the death of your aunt.”

  I thought he might weep. His shoulders slumped, he leaned against the car, and covered his face. I remained wary. Trapped animals usually fought back.

  Not Wilhelm. “You will
find who killed my Aunt Hilda?” he demanded, uncovering his face and finally revealing anger. “She was goot woman.” He growled something in German that I couldn’t decipher.

  “I liked her,” I agreed. “But whoever killed Stiles apparently thought she knew too much and was in that room with us. What did she know? Give me anything that will help me find this murderer.”

  He shook his head wearily. “I know nothing. It is all money and...” He shrugged, not knowing the word. “I do favor for Adolph. He does favor for Tray. Aunt Hilda does favor for me. It is all one thing and nothing.”

  The man wasn’t as stupid as he looked. “What favor did you do for Adolph?”

  “I come in and work that night, even if I have no papers, that is all. I make my vegetable risotto, but there is not enough fresh tomatoes.”

  “Because the risotto wasn’t originally on the menu?” I asked.

  He nodded and pushed his crinkly blond hair off his brow. “Kita’s onion soup was on the menu, but those rich pigs asked for fugu chiri. If you ask me, they got what they deserved. But Adolph could lose his position because of that stupid Jap.”

  I didn’t waste time sorting out nationalities while he was talking. I puzzled over why he thought the puffer fish was a last minute addition when Kita had been practicing for days. “It may have been your risotto that killed them. Who provided the ingredients?”

  “It was not my risotto,” he cried. “I used some cans, yes, but they were good. Any... moron... would know a bad can of tomatoes. What does this do with my aunt?”

  His accent was worsening. I needed to keep him talking. “One killer leads to another,” I said. “What about the salsa? Who made that?”

  “I did. Adolph says the fresh basil and garlic would hide the canned taste. We disagreed, but he is top chef and I am not. After we argue, he chopped the basil and onions for me, in apology, to show it is not all about the money, I think.”

  He didn’t look at me as he said this. Either he was lying, or he was embarrassed—or both. I wasn’t making progress on motivation, but the salsa was looking even better as the weapon of executive destruction.