“Drug lords,” Patra said in disgust. “I’ll hunt for a connection with growers in Afghanistan. Opium flows freely from there through Turkey to Eastern Europe. That will be their supplier.”
“Above my paygrade,” I told her. “I thought this was a chemical painkiller?”
“Read the report,” Sean retorted. “Your guy,” he said it in Americanese to rhyme with cry, “has done a chemical analysis. The main ingredient is only one molecule different from opium. I’m turning that part over to our science people. They’ll find labs to confirm.”
“Freedom of the press at its best,” I said with satisfaction. “The congressional committee didn’t even give the report a hearing.”
To my shock, Girl-Mac finally spoke. “My brother was a soldier who took any painkiller he could get so he could keep fighting even when he was hurt. When he got back home, he overdosed on Mylaudanix. He didn’t know the pills were stronger than the heroin he’d used in the field.”
My jaw probably hung open for a full minute. I snapped it shut. “Was your brother in Afghanistan?”
She nodded curtly, picked up her gear, and moved to the next corner, geek silence fully restored.
“There’s your features angle for those who don’t read hard news,” I told my two reporters, using cynicism to cover my fury. “Soldiers hooked on heroin for their wounds, dying from Big Pharm when they get home.”
After I hung up, Girl-Mac returned to take my phone. She downloaded an app and opened it to show me video images of Guy’s living room. Nick had returned in full aristocratic regalia. He’d be using his plummy English boarding school accent on the guys in black suits.
“Does it hook to the nursery?” I asked, punching arrows on the app. I found it before she could take the phone away again. The kids were sleeping with their arms curled around fuzzy bunnies. “We all started out innocent like that,” I said with regret.
“And then the world corrupts us.” Girl-Mac picked up her tools and stomped out.
Tudor finally returned my text, telling me to check my email box. I opened his message, which was merely a link to a secure website and a reminder to destroy the message. My geek brother has hacked major companies and governments. He knows something about cyber-security, but most of the time, he plays too many cyber games and gets paranoid.
The website provided a lot of computerese that I forwarded to Graham. Then I read Tudor’s translation: Nadia’s laptop couldn’t be traced because there was a net around all her communications waiting for fish to drop in.
That almost made sense. The rest of Tudor’s message was more succinct: the net had been constructed using known Russian spyware.
I was so in over my head.
Chapter 7
“The Russians and the Irish?” Graham muttered to himself, adding a few expletives as he explored the link Tudor had sent Ana. Damn, there was the origin of the prior night’s cyber-attack, the damned report Ana was calling the Hot Potato. What did the Russians really think corralling that report would accomplish? Were they stupid enough to think they could suppress anything as explosive as that drug report?
Not stupid, just ignorant enough to underestimate American ingenuity.
He sent Tudor an urgent warning to stay away from the resource where he’d obtained that information. The geniuses had really embroiled themselves in hot water this time—boiled hot potatoes. Obviously, he’d been working too hard.
He sat back and rubbed his scarred brow. Ana probably thought he’d hidden in this attic because of the scars. He’d rather she kept thinking that, but the truth was much deeper and uglier and would endanger her entire family—one of the reasons he’d tried to keep them out.
But he’d decided months ago that she and her family would find trouble no matter where they went. He was looking at evidence of that now. They were genetically incapable of keeping their noses out of other people’s business—chips off the old block. He’d spent his teen years with their grandfather and admired the old man for good reason, but Max had been a stubborn reckless fool upon occasion.
Like Ana. It was better if he kept the lines of communication open so he could watch over her and her family, as Max had intended.
Because it was Max who had opened the gates of hell. Harvey Scion was one of the demons who now roamed free.
Knowing the feds had no way of pinning the car bomb on anyone in particular, Graham read through the initial findings on the bomb that had detonated the gas line.
As he’d feared, evidence indicated it was old-fashioned gun powder connected to a basic timer and an independent electrical circuit—classic and the same type of device used to kill his father and Ana’s. This century’s bombers used more sophisticated plastic explosives and radio control, but the geezers stuck with what they knew best—timers and commercially available gun powder. This one simply crapped out by hitting a gas line.
With a grimace of reluctance, he opened an old file, one he hadn’t added to in a long time. He’d hoped he’d laid the case to rest, that all the participants were long dead, in jail, or otherwise neutralized. The bomb could mean one of the more lethal demons had escaped his net.
I left the kids sleeping and Nick and Guy dealing with the FBI and local cops. I knew from sad experience that the men in blue wouldn’t give me the information I needed. Nick would have to text me and let me know what little he dragged out of them.
I needed serious down time in which to think.
Once upon a foolish time, my life’s goal was to protect my family. They were almost all grown up now, but not because I’d made the world a safer place, for sure. We’d have to live in a hole in the ground in Iowa before we’d be semi-safe, I figured, and that just wasn’t happening.
The alternative, I was slowly realizing, was taking the offensive against the bad guys who circled us. I’d learned to defend myself against street thugs and taught all my siblings but the twins to do the same. But our current environment was a different kettle of fish than the bullies we’d previously encountered. Our enemies now were people of power and wealth who were driven by the same thuggish motivation—greed, control, and a privileged expectation that they could take what they wanted.
The cops might eventually track down the murderous criminals who smashed Nadia’s car, but they couldn’t bop Scion Pharmaceuticals on the nose and take our wallets back.
Maybe I should think about getting involved. Maybe. Somehow.
Once I got home, I checked on EG. She was building a monster—or a princely Beast—out of papier-mâché and had plastered her room with wet newspaper and paste. I introduced her to Mallard’s cleaning closet and gave her an hour to clean up before bed.
I continued on my way upstairs. I no longer hid my travels to Graham’s lair from my family. We’d all been up there at Christmas. The upper story was no longer a mystery. My family just respected his need for privacy. I didn’t. Now that my family owned half the house, he didn’t get to make the rules any longer.
His office had once been my grandfather’s clubroom. The bar was now Graham’s elongated desk. He wheeled up and down its length on a tall, expensive mesh desk chair that accommodated his size. The billiard table was long gone. The windows had been boarded up and covered with wall-to-wall computer monitors, mostly reflecting security cameras Graham had installed all over town. I never asked if they were all installed at the request of clients or not. Some were public security cameras he’d hacked into. Basically, Graham was the King of Snoops.
Tonight, his monitors were even more disorienting than usual. He had files of text flowing across several screens. Two monitors were showing the yard surrounding Nadia’s house. I was pretty certain one screen displayed an ambassador’s residence down the street. I had no idea what the others were all about.
“Russians?” I asked wearily, querying what he’d found out about Tudor’s message.
“Go to bed, Ana,” he said without turning around.
“Are you going with me?” I countered.
>
I didn’t need his snort to know the answer to that. I had to stand on his desk naked to get his attention some nights. I could do it. I was too tired and too worried to bother.
“If that’s the Russian ambassador’s residence you’re watching,” I studied the lovely French mansard roof his camera was trained on, “you’ll see me heading up the steps in the morning if you don’t give me more information than that.”
“You have no stake in this game,” he said, without turning his head. “Go invest your wealth in politically correct corporations.”
Some days, I thought he was a mind reader.
“Yeah, there’s what, all of two of them?” My energy was building with my anger. I despised being dismissed as useless. “Nick is tied up with a guy the Russian mafia could be bombing. Patra and Sean are working on a document the mafia—or at least Scion—is probably willing to kill to get. And my mother is sending up a hot potato warning to a dangerous man who employs ex-IRA. Tell me again I have no stake in this game.”
“Hot potato warning?” he asked in what sounded like amusement.
“One potato, two potato, duck. I don’t expect you to understand. She’s weird like that.”
“Other people say one potato, two potato, three potato, four,” he said. “It’s a counting game, not for combat.”
I grimaced. He wasn’t ignoring me, just my demands. Since he so seldom commented on my personal life, I chose to reward him. “Magda is creative in ways beyond the obvious. When we were little, she told us fairy tales of the runaway Hungarian princess and the evil king—her way of explaining her past, although I gather the story is warped.”
“Max opened up the hell gates that got your father killed, but he wasn’t evil except in your mother’s mind,” Graham agreed, catching on quickly. He was still scrolling through text and switching up screens—serious ADD combined with PTSD, a volatile mix.
“But the point is,” I continued, “that when Magda was home, which wasn’t often, she got bored and made up things on a level that little kids can understand. We occasionally lived in war zones, but she couldn’t teach toddlers to duck and cover without terrifying them.”
It had taken me years, and the help of a few dozen counselors, to sort through these memories.
Graham glanced over his shoulder, his dark eyes revealing his understanding. “One potato, two potato, duck—teaching you to obey the command through games. Clever. How does this apply to Rose?”
“Clever would have been raising us in green fields with cows,” I said resentfully. “And if it’s Magda behind the balloons, she’s warning Rose she’s after him. Third time’s the charm. But that’s just my cynical surmise.”
“You don’t need to be her,” he warned. “She has people looking after her. You’re not on their radar. Stay low and stay out of it.”
She had people looking after her? Since when? I chose to stay on a more interesting topic—me.
“If you tell me to stay home and take care of the kids, I’ll bean you with your chair.” I was tired, frustrated, and needed understanding, so I was ready to bop him anyway. I gripped the back of his spare office chair, testing its weight. I’d taken out windows with these things.
He finally swung completely around. I am not immune to his deep-set, dark blue eyes by any means. He had the square jaw and wide cheekbones made for movies, but it was the pain registering in the crinkles around those eyes that did me in. I set the chair down.
“Your twisted genius of a mother isn’t in this game because she wants to take out a drug lord,” he said wearily. “She’s come home to finish what she started decades ago. You really need to stay clear to protect your siblings from the fall-out.”
Twisted genius? Well, yeah, that about nailed my mother.
“Tell me what you know and maybe I’ll listen,” I still said stubbornly.
“I don’t know enough,” he retorted, equally obstinate. “I was only ten when our fathers died, not old enough to know what went on. I didn’t live here then.”
“So whatever is happening now dates back to the day our fathers died?” I asked in incredulity. “That’s over twenty-five years ago!”
He gave me one of those stony looks that said he was aware of the obvious.
“But you lived with Max all those years. He knew what happened, didn’t he? Surely, he told you more than I know.” I was tired of dancing around this old sore. I wanted it laid to rest for once and for all.
He hesitated long enough for me to lift the chair again. He shot out a long leg and kicked it from my hands and across the floor. Apparently alleviating some of his tension with that blatant male display of force, he turned back to his keyboard and began typing. I knew better than to mistake Graham for a desk jockey. The man could be a macho ape when he put his mind to it.
“You will be sorry you asked,” he growled. “I’m sending you the file. By the time you read through decades of trash, maybe this will all have blown over.”
I doubted it. Reading through entire libraries was my specialty. Foreign languages slowed me down, but I doubted that would be a problem here.
“Magda could marry and have another baby before this is all over,” I said cynically. “She’s the queen of long and drawn-out. And if she’s reached her final mark, expect public torture. My mother is beautiful and smart but not an especially nice person.”
“Is she into Mata Hari hats?” he asked unexpectedly.
I blinked, then glanced up at his monitors. He was returning a video to its beginning. A banner announcing West Virginia welcomes Senator Rose home crossed a stage.
He switched camera views. I caught a glimpse of a slim woman in a huge floppy-brimmed black hat entering the darkened auditorium. Beside her was a very large person in a spy-style trench coat and fedora. My suspicion-ometer revved into overdrive.
Graham paused the video. The fur coat on the floppy-brimmed hat female was certainly Magda’s style, but between the coat and the hat, there were no distinguishing characteristics that screamed of my mother. Her back was to the camera as she patted the large person reassuringly and turned whoever it was over to a young man who escorted him up the aisle between chairs.
With her back to the camera, Hat Woman slipped out the door of what appeared to be the kind of auditorium colleges or schools might have. Having spent my formative years in palaces and hovels and the occasional overseas military school, I had little experience of auditoriums beyond EG’s current school.
But these were adults in theater-type seating. They were focused on the stage and not the trench-coated giant strolling toward the front as if looking for a seat.
A second camera picked up, and I could see a podium where a silver-haired bureaucrat introduced a too-familiar figure: Senator Rose. My gut clenched, and I examined the floor and ceiling for evidence of balloons.
The audience roared and rose from their seats clapping as the politician beamed down on them with his artificially white smile in his artificially bronzed, fake face—not that I’m prejudiced or anything.
Instead of pontificating this time, Rose opened to questions from the floor as if this were a town hall meeting. A tall, model-thin blonde stood at a microphone on the floor below the stage. She called out a name from a card. Apparently, speakers and questions had been prepared before they began. How. . . artificial. I wanted water balloons to pop over Rose’s head to see if his face would slide off.
I feared balloons would be the least of his worries as Trench Coat walked up to the microphone. I waited in anticipation as much as dread. A spotlight fell on the fedora. The large person dropped the coat and removed his fedora, revealing he was a she. I would have breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of weapons, except the spectacle was more potent—and entertaining.
Mystery Woman had to be nearly six feet tall and three hundred pounds, and she was wearing a pink bikini with pink—how does one say this politely?—kitty ears on her thick brown curls.
The audience sat stunned. Even the security
guards couldn’t tear their gazes away. Terrorists could have mowed down the entire audience. But this was no terrorist.
“Hello, Senator Rose, do you remember me, Gertrude?” the bikini-clad female asked in a high-pitched, girlish voice that didn’t match her appearance. “I worked for your mother when you were just out of college, remember?”
Rose actually looked baffled—and very nervous.
Gertrude didn’t give him time to answer. “You threatened to have me fired if I didn’t have sex with you that summer, remember? My mother was dying of cancer, and I needed the job. When I got pregnant, you paid for me to have an abortion.”
The leader of the anti-abortion cadre, Rose turned red all the way to his artificially bronzed ears and gestured for security to take her away.
But Gertrude was having none of it, and she was big enough to sit on Rose’s security. She’d obviously waited a long time for this moment in the sun. She gestured, too, and a tall woman stepped up from a front seat, dropping her floor-length ugly down coat as she did.
“Your daughter, Senator,” Gertrude said proudly. “My mother died that winter, so I took your money and her insurance, kept my precious baby, and built my own business.”
The daughter was. . . buxom, very generously buxom. And wearing a gold lame bikini and matching kitty ears. I was beginning to imagine what kind of business Gertrude had started.
The senator was staring open-mouthed at his daughter, who was probably the spitting image of her mother thirty years ago. I started grinning—until the spotlight snapped off and black-suited figures spilled off the stage and toward the microphone. Gertrude couldn’t fight off an army of goons, and the show was over.
The stunned audience merely murmured as the pair were presumably marched off. There wasn’t enough light to tell from the video.
“The film clip was generated at a rally this afternoon. It just appeared on Times Square billboards.” Graham pulled up a shot of the notorious lighted screens towering over one of the busiest intersections in the world.
Twisted Genius Page 6
