Cyber Genius

by Patricia Rice

  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.

  Three

  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.

  He didn’t have a hacker program that worked with the tablet. He couldn’t crack the code. If Ana had set it, his software probably couldn’t hack it either. She didn’t know programming, but she was devious. She had the smarts to take the basic hacking knowledge he’d given her and run with it.

  He ran down the list of available networks until he found someone’s laptop that was unprotected. Pathetic wankers.

  The signal was weak. He sat on the window and moved the tablet around until the signal strengthened. Would Ana give him access to her network later? He couldn’t do much at this speed, but he had to know how big a shambles he’d made.

  Fingers trembling, he tuned in to the tablet’s search engine. It came up as always—the internet hadn’t totally collapsed then. Maybe that gave him a little time.

  He checked MacroWare’s site to see if they’d announced an emergency security update.

  Instead, he read the headline about the death of Stephen Stiles.

  Gahhhh, nooooo!!!!!!

  Paralyzed in shock, he simply stared for a full stomach-churning minute. The geek king was dead? How was that possible? Stiles should be invincible, like Superman.

  But fish poisoning? That was so cocked up!

  Selfishly, his next thought was to wonder if there’d been time for anyone to consult with Stiles about Tudor’s message. Had he set his programmers to fix the hole in the O/S? Oh blimey bloomin’ hell... what if he hadn’t?

  Desperately, Tudor searched for news of crashing websites, a dangerous worm eating government data, or a security update.

  He found nothing.

  Rocking back and forth and moaning, realizing he was not only up a creek without an oar, but sitting on the bleeding Titanic, he wondered what in the name of Ramses he did now.

  ***

  Ana lingers in Graham’s lair

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of the old corduroys I’d worn to the airport and stared at the back of Graham’s head. “Murdered?” I inquired innocently, as if I hadn’t been sitting on fear all morning.

  His black cat leapt from his lap, circled my ankles in disdain, and escaped through the door I’d left open. I sneezed, which added to my irritation.

  Having my paranoid conspiracy fantasies confirmed wasn’t supposed to happen. “Food poisoning hardly qualifies as murder.”

  “Puffer fish numbs the mouth. Anything else in the food wouldn’t be detected.” He brought up a health department warning of symptoms on one screen, then what appeared to be a hospital medical record on another. “Knowing puffer fish had been served, doctors had no reason to look further than the toxicology reports showing toxic levels of tetrodotoxin in the blood stream. The symptoms and evidence are correlated to the fish.”

  If I hadn’t known about Tudor’s little problem, I would have shrugged and said food poisoning, got it, just like everyone else. But food poisoning of execs sitting on a potentially major operational failure that could cause stockholders gazillions... that had my suspicious mind on edge.

  Graham had said murder. Why?

  “And?” was the only reply I could summon.

  “The symptoms disguised massive botulism poisoning.” He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at a new screen he’d keyed up.

  Even sitting, Graham was a big man, with wide shoulders, broad chest, and powerful arms. It was warm up here in the windowless attic, so instead of the heavy sweaters the rest of us wore, he was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that clung lovingly to pectorals and biceps. I wanted to swat him upside his thick head of ebony hair just for existing, which admittedly made me surly.

  “Not making sense yet,” I warned. “Botulism is still food poisoning, not murder.”

  “Botulism is overkill. I doubt the doctors looked for it. I had to confiscate a blood sample and have it tested.” He grunted and wielded his keyboard to open a few more screens of talking heads.

  Graham said outrageous things like that all the time without apology or explanation. Nick’s employers had a right to be suspicious about him.

  “Why?” I demanded, knowing I had to drag every grain of information out of the tight-lipped rat. “Why would you test a sample when the doctors are satisfied with puffer fish?”

  “Stiles kept a pretty close monitor on his food, hiring special chefs. He wouldn’t hire an incompetent fugu chef,” he said, fine tuning a camera showing a hospital entrance. “I get paid to know things like that. I am not idly living off Max’s millions.”

  Wow, a personal admission, two, actually. A new first.

  “I never thought you stole our inheritance. I thought our grandfather’s lawyer smoked all the money,” I said angrily. “Did you think I’d live in the house of a callous crook who would rob little children?”

  I was stunned that he thought I’d considered him a thief. A lying, conniving, creepy spider in the attic who had misappropriated our house by legal means, yes, but a common thief, never. He was a brilliant man who’d been on a high-speed destiny path and had worked with the president of the United States, for pity’s sake. He probably still worked for the CIA or worse—that had always been my vision of him.

  So, he wasn’t a philanthropist but a paid security something or other. Big freakin’ deal.

  This was
probably the longest and most revealing conversation we’d ever had. Usually, we flung a few insults, played competitive head games, and got back to work. I had to wonder where this was going—and worry.

  “Max was ill, not stupid.” Graham opened a document on screen showing a bank transfer receipt with a whole lot of zeroes on it. “He started moving funds before he died. That could have precipitated his death.”

  My grandfather’s coke-sniffing renegade lawyer had robbed, then poisoned him, but that ship had long sailed. The lawyer was dead now and couldn’t be our current culprit.

  I stared at my grandfather’s name on the bank receipt and got wobble-kneed. Our inheritance might still be out there? That realization had me hunting for a place to sit before my legs collapsed under me.

  Unable to find a chair in the dark, I folded up and took the floor. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” I wanted to shout and kick and throw a tantrum, but that wouldn’t impress Graham. “That’s our money!”

  Money that might buy back this house. Or put the remaining four of my younger half-siblings through college. Probably not both house and college, especially if MIT was their goal, and all the others demanded an equal share.

  “I don’t have the code to access the funds or the time to figure it out,” Graham admitted. “Swiss banks will sit on assets until the end of creation before they’ll release accounts, unless you can find the access code. I’m simply telling you that I earn my money the same way you do.” He clicked a switch and the receipt was replaced by a lab report.

  “Like heck you do,” I muttered. I knew how to swear in twenty languages. I’d trained myself not to for the sake of my younger siblings, but sometimes... I needed to kick something—like Graham. “I’d have to work fifty hour days to afford this set up.”

  “People pay for my knowledge and contacts. You don’t have anything worth that kind of dough,” he said.

  Before I could smack him upside the head for the insult, he turned around and dropped the shock bomb. “I’ll give you all the information I possess on your grandfather’s accounts if you’ll work this case for me.”

  My jaw dropped but no sound passed my lips. The explosion in my head was so huge that it took a few moments to process all the ramifications of his declaration. All the normal questions like “Why now? Why me?”—and the fury that he’d been concealing Max’s accounts—coalesced into one loaded shell of sarcasm.

  “Giving me the information on Max’s money amounts to paying me with my own coin! Why can’t big bad you do it yourself?” I said.

  He didn’t even shrug. “Because once the cops get smart and realize Stiles was murdered, they’ll be coming after me next. I have both motive and opportunity. The murderer couldn’t have set me up better if I’d planned it.” He slumped wearily in his high-backed desk chair.

  His computer screens didn’t provide adequate illumination to read his expression, but I could read his body language. He was tense and desperate.

  “What motive?” I demanded, because that sounded really bad.

  He hesitated. Obviously, he wasn’t interested in coming clean across the board. I refused to budge until he answered.

  “Let’s just say that Stiles had a few close... associates... who took a different career path. I don’t want to bias you with those reports. I’d prefer you look at everyone, but several people on the managerial level were about to be fired. At least one of the ill executives argued against the firing and others accused Stiles of letting me run the company. They’ve started internal rumors of my replacing the board. After the murder charge is placed, they will report all this to the police. Once the police realize I do exist, they will happily believe I’m capable of corporate takeover by puffer fish, especially since I was in the hotel that night. It will be incredibly difficult to find the real murderer if I’m behind bars.”

  I knew Graham was secretive about his identity. Amadeus Graham, hermit extraordinaire, would not normally walk into a major company like MacroWare as himself. He would have used an alias. What identity the board feared wouldn’t matter once the real Graham’s existence was confirmed.

  “If those associates are the prime suspects, would they really kill off Stiles to get at you?”

  “It’s possible that they’re stupid,” he grumbled. “But there are other elements involved. I don’t want to taint your investigations by listing my enemies when the motive could possibly be elsewhere.”

  “I’m not a detective,” I reminded him. “I can’t even read that lab report that seems to have set you off. If the police are satisfied with food poisoning as an explanation, I can’t even see why you’re worried.”

  “Puffer fish poisoning isn’t always deadly. A lot of it depends on how much is consumed and the physical condition of the person eating it.” He brought up another medical screen with a list of botulism symptoms. “But it will lower the immune system sufficiently for another poison to complete the damage. I called for the blood work because they didn’t have enough fish poison to die.”

  I skimmed the article and slammed into the remedies. Botulism could be cured! “If you’re saying they had botulism as well as fish poisoning,” I nearly shouted in shock, “have you called the hospital?”

  “Why the hell do you think I’m worrying?” he shouted back, proving he was unusually unnerved.

  Normally, we’d both be taking out our panic by kicking and beating bags in the gym, but we didn’t have time for that.

  “I sent an anonymous warning,” he said wearily. “They should be treating the surviving three for botulism now. Once they recover, they’ll start talking, and that’s when the cops will start looking for me.”

  I finished reading the article. This was all quite fascinating, but I wasn’t seeing direct connections to Graham or Tudor, my main concerns. “They were eating badly canned veggies?” I asked, grimacing. “That does not compute.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. That’s how I know it’s murder. Someone deliberately added tainted food to their entree. It takes hours for the symptoms to appear, so the kitchen was already clean before anyone became sick. The rules of puffer fish preparation require complete removal of all remains immediately. The health department searched Thursday, after Stiles was hospitalized and the diagnosis of fish poisoning was made, but any trace of the meal was long gone. The killer knew what he was doing.”

  “The killer must have had motive and opportunity too,” I protested. “If you were there, did you see who was with them?” I loved a good puzzle. I wasn’t loving this one.

  “Are you saying you’ll work with me?” he asked.

  As much as I liked having him by the short hairs for a change, I resented the insult. “What, you think I’ll let them hang you and let a killer go free?”

  He didn’t so much as blink an eyelash but continued as if I’d said yes. “I’m on retainer to hunt security breaches in MacroWare’s software as well as their internal network. Stiles recently alerted me to a national security breach and demanded that we meet in person.”

  Uh oh. Here it was. Even knowing heads were about to roll, I couldn’t resist curiosity. “You’d never met? He paid a fortune to an invisible spy in my attic?”

  He swiveled his chair enough to give me a gimlet glare. Beneath thick lashes Graham has deep dark eyes that could skewer with just a look.

  “They pay for invisibility. You do the same, so quit gloating, or you’ll be arrested for harboring a criminal when I go down.”

  I could just move out, but I wouldn’t, and he knew it. That’s what happened when I let people into my life. They owned me.

  “Ok, fine.” I waved a dismissive hand as if I was handed national security assignments every day. “Did you meet Stiles?”

  “Only briefly. He wanted me to join them at dinner. I told him that was a ridiculously reckless idea. I arranged a suite to meet in privacy and had the place swept for bugs while they ate. Only Stiles and Bates, his right hand man, came up to the room. This was several hours
after dinner and speeches, and they weren’t feeling well. They pointed me at a security breach, and I called a doctor for them. I left them with staff, but if a whiff of murder comes out, it won’t be difficult for the police to trace my presence.”

  “You don’t see any connection between a security breach and poison?” I asked, not so innocently. “Did you look for the breach?”

  He sighed and managed to look conflicted. “This is to go no further than this room, but the operating system breach is in their brand new, unreleased beta software that’s only recently been given to designated government and commercial organizations for testing.”

  Graham called up programming code and scrolled through it, highlighting lines of jargon. If he expected me to follow what he was doing, he overrated my abilities. “The breach appears to be limited to the beta program. It will take time to uncover the extent of damage. If that’s Tudor you’ve stored downstairs, I could put him to work, too.”

  I would let Tudor sleep a while before pounding his head into a pillow and telling him he wasn’t responsible for crippling the internet—MacroWare was. Or that was my assumption, anyway. MacroWare had far more power than my baby brother, even though it was hard to imagine the State Department testing beta software.

  Instead of complaining about Graham’s spying on my guests, I diverted the subject. “I’m a research assistant, nothing more. I have no idea what that code says or what it does. What can I do about someone who apparently breaches computer security and poisons CEOs? You need an army just to protect the guys in the hospital.”

  “The list of designated agencies testing the beta program is not reliable. I’m copying you on my research into which websites and agencies have been breached so far. We’ll need to drill down, find the related servers, computers, and technicians. Maybe we’ll find a pattern.”

  Yeah, and maybe someday I’d walk the moon.

  I pried myself from the floor, trying to calculate how I could untie this mighty knot of secrecy. He needed to know about Tudor’s monster and that he’d been the one to warn Stiles, and Tudor needed to know about the beta program and his hero’s murder, but the knowledge was too explosive to share without permission. “Did it ever occur to you that you might need a team of experts for jobs of this scope?”