Cyber Genius

by Patricia Rice

  “Yes, Tray wanted me to hire the little Kink ferret, but I... did... not... kill... Kita.” He whacked his knife against a chopping block to punctuate his words. He was starting to look pretty fiery-eyed. “I did not kill anybody! Dried fugu is nothing.” He swung the knife and decapitated a string of garlic.

  “And what did you get in trade for hiring Kita and drying fish guts?” I reached the refrigerator section and decided that wasn’t a good direction. I ducked under another table while the kitchen sheep just watched us as if we were a TV movie.

  “So, I do a favor for a friend who wants an aphrodisiac!” Adolph shouted. “That is stupid thinking but not poison!” He made as if he was coming at me from one direction, then darted the other when I tried to avoid him.

  Trapped by refrigerators, I skidded to a halt and looked for a weapon. A nearly empty giant sack of flour was all I could find. I flung it in Adolph’s direction, then ducked behind stacked shelves of dessert trays. “Hogswallow!” I called back.

  He stabbed the sack in mid-air, showering himself, lunch, and half the kitchen in a white powdery blizzard. The desserts were deluged in a white film. Shame to waste them. I ran my finger through a particularly sumptuous icing. If I was about to die, I wanted chocolate first.

  “Kita’s soup wasn’t poisoned. He was too honest for that,” I declared, making up the scenario as I dodged Adolph. “But you needed imperialist pig mouths numbed so they couldn’t taste your rotten tomatoes,” I called while Adolph angrily shook out his chef’s hat, spraying more flour. “You’re not so dumb that you wouldn’t have looked up the results of dried puffer fish liver.”

  “They do not eat anything that tastes good!” he cried, diving for the dessert shelves as if to reach through them and strangle me. He succeeded in knocking a fat carrot cake slice in my direction. I caught it and nibbled as we danced back and forth on either side of the trays.

  “One asshole doesn’t want gluten,” he roared. “Another doesn’t eat meat but fish is okay. Another wants no dairy! They don’t use their taste buds anyway!”

  “Who asked you for the dried guts?” The cake was dry. Dry carrot cake is a sin. I threw the rest of it in a sink and wiped my hands on a towel as I skirted around the frozen dessert chef—as in, the chef seemed paralyzed, not her desserts. She didn’t even smack my hand when I swiped a handful of chocolate morsels.

  Adolph flung a bowl of draining pasta at me. I ducked, and spaghetti strands stuck to shelves and counters. Perfectly al dente, nice.

  “Ask Mr. Livingston,” a voice called from behind me. “Euan said she overheard him talking to Adolph about aphrodisiacs.”

  “Ah, now we’re getting somewhere, thank you!” I called to the snitch over my shoulder. The hotel manager who knew Tray and Paul Rose and knew about old wiring that could be shorted with pennies was another nice connection.

  My expertise seemed to be in seeing the big cynical picture, then finding the puzzle pieces that fit. The picture was slowly coming together.

  “Wonder what happens to all the underwater mortgages you’re all holding if Goldrich gets indicted for fraud?” I asked, hitting him where it hurt to see what happened. “Do you worry about that, Adolph? Huh? Will imminent foreclosure persuade you to talk?”

  Adolph stabbed his knife into a chopping block with a blow so vicious, I thought the heavy wood would crack. Without a single look back, he stalked out of the kitchen.

  Score one to the harpy.

  Grimacing, I followed. I borrowed a loose knife, just in case he had more hidden in his coat.

  Twenty-three

  Tudor’s Take:

  Relieved that the gormless bloke who thought Tudor was IT maintenance had only wanted him to fix his computer, Tudor sat in the prat’s fancy office, patiently attempting to explain computers.

  “Look, all you need to do is clear your caches and run a defrag before you go home tonight,” Tudor repeated in frustration. He pushed out of the posh office chair and tried to get around the big wanker in a pin-stripe suit blocking his exit. The guy had dragged him down to the office level, away from the program he’d almost broken into. “I have to update the system before I can leave tonight. If your defrag doesn’t work, I’ll look at it again tomorrow.”

  Only in another dimension, he thought, but he had to escape the tosser in the expensive Rolex. Lying seemed expedient. He should never have followed him down to the first floor, but he’d been nervous about refusing someone who had to be management.

  “Look, we’re in the middle of a crisis here,” Rolex argued. “We have to know if there are any security breaches causing the servers to crawl. You guys can check for that kind of thing, can’t you?”

  “It would be easier for me to go through an unused computer to check that,” Tudor assured him, not as comfortable with lying as Ana was. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here.” He tried to ease toward the office door.

  Rolex invaded Tudor’s personal space, pushing him back toward the desk. “Start with this computer. I’ll get out of your way.”

  This was a plush office, not an anonymous cubicle. Tudor craved anonymity. Contact with authority made his skin crawl. He was probably supposed to know this dork’s name and bow to his grandiose title. But the guy wore no badge, and the door label merely read Vice President of Sales.

  Why would a sales guy care about security?

  “I don’t usually work this way,” Tudor said, glancing longingly at the door Mr. VP blocked. “I’ll have to back-up your entire drive, and I didn’t bring any extra externals with me.”

  “It’s all backed up,” VP said proudly, patting a dusty older model drive behind a stack of report files.

  Tudor bit off a whatever that would have given away his age. “Fine,” he agreed in a surly tone. “Just don’t disturb me. I need focus. Just one missed piece of code could take days to unscramble.”

  “Right. Make certain that spyhole they’re talking about isn’t in there.” Smiley-face stood in the doorway until Tudor took a seat at the ergonomically incorrect computer console. “I’ll stop by a little while later to see if you need anything.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Tudor muttered and opened the screen—no password. This prat really never used this machine, did he? He rolled his eyes and said nothing as the office door shut behind him. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  That’s what he thought until he tried to access the main frame. A red alert message filled the screen, warning an unsecured application was being executed.

  The firewall threw up barriers and the screen went dark.

  ***

  Ana fights another day

  After the knife-stabbing incident, the kitchen’s shocked silence erupted into cacophony. Since no one offered to help me catch their furious head chef, I raced into the corridor after Adolph. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I wasn’t ready to let him escape until I had answers or he gave them to the police.

  Livingston had asked about aphrodisiacs. Bates had said the salt shaker contained aphrodisiacs. Adolph hadn’t denied drying fish liver. Had Livingston asked because Bates had asked him? Or was the hotel manager the inspiration for this little tongue numbing experiment? Since Bates was dead, Adolph had some explaining to do.

  Once in the block-wall passage, I saw Adolph stalking toward an exit on my left—and Brian Livingston and security approaching from the elevators on my right. They looked grim.

  I now knew that the hotel manager was a Rose minion who had hired Adolph on Tray’s recommendation. Except for my dislike of Senator Rose, that wasn’t suspicious in itself. Livingston had not been in the room where Hilda had been shot—but his staff could easily have shorted the wiring for the real killer. That was pure speculation.

  Not knowing how deeply the manager was involved, I went after the devil I knew. I turned left, in pursuit of Adolph.

  Security shouted at me. As previously noted, tight skirts are lousy for running. I yanked the hem up my thighs but Adolph had a head
start and the security goons had longer legs.

  To my relief, Maggie stepped out of a side corridor carrying a heavily loaded tray. I didn’t think her appearance was an accident. She looked wide-eyed but determined as she balanced the tray.

  Reaching her, I grabbed the weapon she proffered. With ill intent, I flung the tray and all its contents at the security goons. I hoped that was fish soup soaking their black blazers. Calamari appeared to drip from one guy’s forehead.

  Maggie winked, then screamed dramatically as she dropped to her knees in the middle of the floor to retrieve her broken crockery, blocking the corridor. This returning favors business worked both ways.

  I raced after Adolph. Behind me, I heard the goons cursing as they slid in goo, tripped over Maggie, and crunched her dishes.

  Adolph had almost made it to the elevator I had taken once with Euon, the one leading to the parking lot. I’d never catch up with him if he got outside. I yanked my skirt higher and picked up speed. “Down, Adolph, or they’ll shoot!”

  I could have been lying. Hard to say. Security was cursing and mad enough to shoot, at least.

  Adolph threw himself to one side of the hall and slumped to make a smaller target—military training, maybe. At least he knew he couldn’t outrun bullets.

  I swung around, waving my kitchen knife threateningly at the angry security guys. “No closer. Call the cops, if you want, but you don’t touch this man.”

  Since they probably had been after me, that messed with their minds a little. With their shoes still slick from the mess Maggie had created, the guards slid to a halt and quit reaching for their guns. Behind them, Livingston looked panicked.

  Now we were getting somewhere. I liked panic on the face of my victims.

  My phone rang with the Batman theme. It was a lousy time for my spy in the attic to finally put in an appearance. “Get Adolph before the goons do,” I ordered before Graham had a chance to say a word.

  “Tudor is at MacroWare. They’ve just shut down all their servers,” Graham countered.

  I had no idea what that meant beyond the urgency of his tone. “I’ll get on it.” Since he was right upstairs in the hotel with all the security monitors, he had to know what was happening down here in the kitchen. “How close are the cops?”

  “They’re at the back door.” He clicked off.

  Well, at least he hadn’t told me to get my ass out of this mess. That would be stating the obvious, I suppose. At least he’d called the cops for me and given me enough warning to haul my petite derriere out of sight before they dragged me to their torture chambers and forced me to give up Tudor.

  “Adolph, if you don’t tell the cops what you know, I will,” I said, glaring at Livingston and not the defeated chef. “I recommend that all of you start talking while the rest of us try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. MacroWare is going down and taking a lot of fat cats with it. The fate of the western world really could be on your shoulders. Try that hat on for size, cowboys.”

  I ran back to the corridor where I’d last seen Maggie just as the elevator door burst open with the boys in blue.

  Apparently watching for me, Maggie swore beneath her breath and followed me down the side passage.

  “Try that hat on for size?” she asked in incredulity. “Did you just pull out every cliché you know?”

  “Obfuscation and smoke clouds make for great escapes. My brother is in trouble,” I told her, racing for the unknown. “How do I get out of this maze?”

  “This way.” She led me through a warren of service tunnels and elevators until we were at the loading dock in back.

  “Think positive,” I told her, punching the button to open the wide loading doors.

  “I positively think you’re nuts and I’m going home,” she declared, stalking out onto the dock with me. “I’m not working with killers.”

  I didn’t try to rearrange her thinking. Adolph was no master mind, just an angry, needy idiot who would sell his shriveled soul for money. I needed the real killer. I’d been putting two and two together. If I subtracted Adolph from the equation, the result led straight to MacroWare—where Tudor had apparently ensconced himself. I had a real nasty feeling about that.

  I gripped my kitchen knife harder. Maybe I ought to learn to use a knife, but for right now, for my purposes, it was useless.

  It was dark as we traversed the delivery alley. I offered my weapon to Maggie for her trip home while I peeled off in the direction of MacroWare.

  A black sedan waited for me at the end of the alley. The way my life was going, I prayed it hadn’t been sent by the ghost of Stephen Stiles. Or his killer.

  ***

  Tudor’s Take:

  “Bugger it!” Tudor shouted at the abruptly crashing computer. Fighting panic, he shoved back the executive’s chair and headed for the door.

  It was locked.

  He stared in incredulity for much longer than he should have. Ana would have been quicker off the mark. She’d told him he was getting soft. He hadn’t understood—until now.

  Even as an ankle-biter he’d had enough gray matter to recognize that animals reacted violently and irrationally when trapped. He’d apparently been nattering with a desperado and hadn’t caught on. He grokked computers, not people, blast it.

  A quick glance around his prison revealed an office where no one actually worked. No filing cabinets. No big desk drawers filled with potential weapons. No souvenir swords on the wall. Just one old computer on some prissy furniture and a stack of paper.

  Old trick—he checked the ceiling. Acoustic ceiling tile, probably on an aluminum grid. Tudor climbed onto the desk and shoved up a tile. He wasn’t heavy, but even his weight was likely to pull that flimsy grid down. But there had to be supports up there somewhere.

  He pushed the desk to the wall. Fancy wood or not, a desk without real drawers weighed nothing. He climbed up again and found what he needed—a steel beam he could haul himself out on.

  Once he got himself into the space between floors that housed all the building’s wiring and ducts, he had time to think.

  Rolex Prat had lured him down here and locked him in deliberately. Had he recognized Tudor and gone for the feds? Or had he just pounced on any stray IT person? Why? To blame him for the crash? That seemed most likely. Rolex Prat had needed a sucker to take the fall—for what? What was the prat doing?

  Unwilling to give up this chance to access MacroWare’s servers and save the internet, Tudor eased along the beams, listening for activity. Mostly, he heard shouted obscenities. Had all the servers crashed? He cursed the acoustic tile that prevented hearing normal conversation.

  Wondering if any of the wires that he was crawling over might be cable he could connect to a computer, he started removing ceiling tiles and peering into offices. One good laptop would be a start.

  His phone vibrated. He didn’t want to answer it and admit he was in trouble, but he really needed to know what was happening.

  He glanced at a message on the screen.

  all emergency servers crashed. get out now.

  From Graham. The man was damned spooky. Did he know where Tudor was right now? And what the bloody dickens did he mean about emergency servers? Did they have them at MacroWare?

  Or did he mean cops? Ambulances? Almost anything operating on MacroWare could conceivably be shut down—just the same way MacroWare updated its software—invisibly, while people slept. The possibility that computers to the police and fire departments were offline froze his guts.

  Brain power worked better than panic—new mantra.

  Taking a deep breath, Tudor found a messy but unoccupied office. On the desk below gleamed a really hot new netbook. Score! He swung down from the beams and shoved the little beauty into his shirt before climbing back into his hiding place. Years of video gaming had taught him when to hide if he wanted to win the treasure.

  Turning on the pricey little machine, he checked the battery power and admired the speedy processor with enough RAM
to fuel the CIA. Satisfied, he closed the tile and crept to a safer surface to see what connections he could make.

  Judging from the icons, the office’s wireless network had no signal—a very bad sign. Graham hadn’t provided a smartphone with cellular access. Without his hacker programs, it would take forever to manually crack any of the other networks.

  He really wanted into MacroWare’s servers. If they were down, all his plans would go pear-shaped.

  Grumbling, he sent Graham an encrypted text with the password to his cloud account where he’d stored the program patch. He didn’t know if the patch would work. He’d wanted to test it while everyone else was fighting crime. But if everything blew up in his face, he wanted back-up out there.

  Once that was done, he began hacking at the various networks the system was showing.

  He smelled smoke just as he finally broke into a secure network named MWSucks.

  Twenty-four

  Ana freaks out

  The sedan isolated me from the panic in the streets. Looking out the tinted windows, I only saw worker bees hurrying harmlessly down the sidewalk. I couldn’t hear the buzz or sense their anxiety as I had earlier.

  But the message from Graham about emergency service computers blacking out was sufficient to escalate my adrenalin. How much did the police and fire departments rely on the internet? What about hospitals?

  From my luxury seat, I couldn’t tell anything was wrong. Riots weren’t breaking out in the street. But the further we traveled, the more stoplights seemed to be out. I vaguely remembered reading about a complex network that allowed computers to change signals in emergencies and rush hour. That network was obviously not working. Cops would have to take subways to bypass the traffic tie-ups. Not good.

  The internet on my phone wasn’t fast enough for me to flip through the necessary websites to understand what was happening. Texting worked best. I messaged Tudor.