Cyber Genius

by Patricia Rice

  “How many million are you paying me for working on Saturdays?” I asked innocently.

  Once upon a time, he’d threatened to heave us out of the house if I didn’t toe his line. Revenge was sweet, and turnabout, fair play.

  Five

  How Ana’s Saturday develops

  The candelabra’s curses shut off abruptly. Once upon a time, I’d shoved the nosy silver into the sideboard. Now, I simply enjoyed my morning tea.

  Let it be known here and now that I may be an introvert who prefers my own company, but I am not shy. I am well aware of my worth, I’m assertive, and unfortunately, I possess my Irish terrorist father’s temper.

  I do not take well to being shouted at in foul language over the breakfast table.

  I leisurely finished my tea while waiting for Graham to digest my rebellion. He’d had the upper hand for too long. Role reversal soothed my angry beast.

  “Does this mean we can go to the Smithsonian today?” EG asked deviously.

  My little sister knew the candelabra was listening as well as I did.

  “I have other clients who need my time,” I said airily. Although, in reality, I’d been cutting back my client list. Family and Graham’s demands took a substantial chunk of my once carefree workaholic’s hours. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  I imagined Graham writhing in wrath at the possibility of my taking two whole days off from addressing his concerns. The man seriously needed an attitude adjustment.

  “Does this mean you’re not taking me up on my offer?” the silver candelabra asked in a menacing tone.

  “It means I consider your offer of payment insulting. I expect the banking information you’re withholding to be downloaded immediately in a gesture of respect, at which point you may ask me politely to visit your office when it’s convenient for me.” I kept my voice neutral. My father’s fiery oratory had got him killed. Mine could still get us booted from paradise. I’d learned caution—but sometimes offense is better than defense.

  “Ana...” Graham said in a deep voice that could be dangerously seductive, or just plain dangerous.

  I opened my phone’s mailbox app and watched a large file from his office hit the screen. It was too large to open on my phone, but I was wagering Graham wasn’t playing games when his cojones were on the chopping block. That should be his file on my grandfather’s Swiss accounts.

  “Nice,” I said, sticking the phone in my pocket. “If you have a few minutes to spare, I’ll be up in ten. Clear your cat out.”

  The silver remained blessedly silent. One could hope I’d taught the devil a lesson in respect.

  No one had defied Graham quite so blatantly in these last months of walking on eggshells. EG stared at me in awe for good reason. “I’ll go finish my homework now. Should I wake Tudor?”

  Since I was currently Ruler of the World, and Tudor was part of my evil plot, I nodded. “Good idea. Tell him to eat quickly before the silver turns mean.”

  Graham used to have a sense of humor, but I heard no sarcastic chuckle now. I could see where he might be a bit off his feed with a murder rap on his horizon. So I politely ran down to my office and checked his folder to be certain that bank receipt with all the zeroes was in it. I didn’t have time to salivate over all the possibilities of recovering my grandfather’s wealth. I had to beard the lion in his den.

  I took my time using the main stairs since EG and Tudor were expecting to see me. They didn’t need to know about the secret passage. Passing by them on the second floor landing, I could see that Tudor looked unkempt and tired. I waved and continued up to Graham’s level.

  Graham probably looked worse than Tudor, but with no window and no lights, it was hard to tell. Judging by his silhouette against the light of a dozen monitors, his hair seemed rumpled. He impatiently shoved aside a thick hank falling into his face. I was pretty certain those were the same jeans and long-sleeved shirt he’d worn yesterday. The sophisticated, tuxedoed, diamond-cufflink man who vividly haunted my memory was visible only in his supple movement as he adjusted various monitors for my perusal.

  I sneezed. He opened a drawer and handed me an antihistamine. Rolling my eyes, I choked it down dry.

  “Here is the list of the dinner’s attendees.” He scrolled down a list of hundreds on the first screen. “Here are photographs and films taken during the meal.” Images of linen-covered hotel tables with a variety of nerds trying to look professional flipped silently on another screen. “We need to verify faces against names.”

  “That will only take a hundred years.” I boldly reached over his shoulder and zoomed in on the head table with Stiles and cohorts. “Who served the Last Supper?” I asked irreverently. The image on the screen showed utensils untouched and napkins still folded.

  He snorted and started flashing through images. “Not Judas.”

  Instead of showing me the servers, as I’d requested, he zoomed in on Stiles, then went around the table, naming the occupants.

  “Henry Bates,” Graham said, identifying the other dead man. Henry wore black-framed nerd glasses like Tudor’s, but his starched collar and glossy tie were meticulous and probably expensive. “Stiles’ right hand man. Bates helped Stiles develop MacroWare’s programs. He was the best candidate for gathering a team to repair any security breaches.”

  “If Bates was a programmer, he knew who had the chops to add spyware, if that’s what we’re dealing with,” I added. “A good reason to want him dead.”

  Graham nodded reluctant agreement. He moved the screen to a youngish man with a full head of blond hair and an ad exec’s smile. “Adam Herkness, VP of Public Relations. He would know nothing about security, but a breach in the new system would be a PR nightmare.”

  The monitor changed to focus on a short, rotund, balding man. “Bob Stark, VP of Finance.” The fifth and last man was a middle-aged Latino with a mustache. “Enrique Gomez, VP of Security.”

  “Any good reason they’d tell a financial guy about any security breach?” I asked as Graham opened more video images and zoomed up on the executive table at the front of the room.

  “Bob Stark helped fund Stiles when they started out. They were friends. And reports of a breach could be disastrous to stock prices and the bottom line. He had to be prepared for a shit storm.”

  I didn’t often respect rich people—money creates illusions of superiority and I’d been around too many wealthy tyrants growing up—but I could respect friendship and honesty. “So we have five people here who feared the new software had a problem and weren’t worried enough not to feed their faces. Doesn’t sound as if the breach was big enough to murder for.”

  The last murder case I got stuck investigating had snowballed—or fireballed—into murder and mayhem endangering my family and friends. I was not eager to get involved in anything similar.

  But Graham had helped us. In no universe could I reject his request for aid now. The problem was obviously larger than the local police department, who had no good reason to call in the feds, yet. The local cops didn’t know about the hole in the State Department website firewall. They probably didn’t even know about the beta program.

  Graham opened a screen showing my bulging mailbox. “I’ve sent you all the material I uncovered last night. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, even if the flaw is only in the few distributed to government testers, it has the potential of breaching national security on every level from the NSA to the laptops of Senate committees. If the flaw is in every program...” He didn’t have to explain. The nightmare was universe-size.

  “Stiles may not have known the extent of the breach that night,” Graham continued, “but he recognized enough of the possible disastrous repercussions to call me in. He didn’t have time to send all his files before he was hospitalized, so I don’t know what kind of actions—if any—have been taken already. And under the circumstances, I’m wary of hacking MacroWare right now or revealing information he gave me in confidence.”

  “So far as we know, none of this
actually affects the internet, right?” I asked, voicing Tudor’s terror. “The web remains up and running?”

  He shot me a puzzled look over his shoulder. “The internet does not run on MacroWare.”

  A fat lot he knew if he didn’t realize Tudor’s monster could chomp into website servers through that damned hole. But he didn’t know about that... yet.

  Graham halted one of the dinner videos and backed up. A plump waitress in a discreet black pant suit was slipping entree dishes onto the table while the men laughed and ignored her. She was white, not young, not pretty, just efficient.

  Graham took a screen shot and sent it to my mailbox. “Start there when you research the list of kitchen staff I sent you.”

  “She didn’t cook the soup, and I’m not seeing her shooting up the veggies,” I protested, reverse bigotry in full sail. I wanted the old white dudes to be guilty.

  “Chain of command. Who assigned her to that table? Who handed her the tray? I need you to ask the questions. I cannot be found and drawn in for questioning—I know too much about subjects that are irrelevant to murder.”

  I assumed his paranoia had a substantial basis given his checkered career. And knowing the underbelly of governments, I didn’t argue his point. Given his level of knowledge, Graham was a ticking time bomb a lot of agencies would like to get their hands on.

  “I may have to disappear until this case is solved, so I’m leaving a lot in your hands,” Graham reminded me in a grim voice.

  “Not the cat, I hope,” I said facetiously, but he had opened the subject uppermost on my mind. “Tudor can help you. He knows more about the breach than anyone. He’s willing to tell you what he knows, but I’m not willing to get him involved in murder unless I know we’ve employed all possible caution. I need to work with all my family on a job this large.”

  He quit clicking his keyboard, sat back, and actually looked at me. That didn’t happen often. I straightened, crossed my arms, and waited. His dark eyes, razor-sharp cheekbones, and square jaw could be intimidating, but physical appearance didn’t daunt me as much as brains. Graham possessed more than should be humanly possible.

  “How much family and how involved?” he asked, sensibly. He understood Tudor’s talents and would question him in geek-speak later. The rest of my family, on the other hand, were capable of starting nuclear wars if called upon.

  “Not Magda,” I assured him, “unless one of her boyfriends is involved. But Tudor knows programming and hacking. Patra can ferret info out of media files. Nick has Brit intelligence resources at his fingertips. Relying on each other is how we work.”

  He glowered, then returned to the videos. “My business relies on secrecy. It’s much easier for me to operate if no one but my clients know I exist or how to find me. Patra is building a career on revealing information I’d prefer was kept private. The media are obsolete and no longer the protector of our constitutional rights.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” I retorted, intelligently. “Media are gossips, voters are uneducated idiots, the government is corrupt, and what exactly has changed in centuries? You use the tools you’re given. We need information. I obtain it through connections, not cameras on every corner. Obviously, your methods are different. We either combine forces or I go back to my clients and translating letters from Thailand.”

  As a virtual assistant with international contacts, I often juggled translations, scientific research, and communication for a variety of scholarly clients. Graham had taken advantage of my skills and contacts more than once. He had to trust my knowledge or we couldn’t do this.

  “You’ve never had to keep this level of confidentiality,” he argued.

  “I was Magda’s right hand man for twenty years,” I responded in a voice heavily laden with sarcasm. “My grandfather was her tutor as well as yours. Do you really think I led a charmed life while you were dining with presidents?”

  “I don’t like it,” he said flatly.

  “You should have thought of that before you took an ego trip to meet Stiles in person instead of Skyping. Get over it. Find a new business model, whatever. You were the last person to see Stiles before the ambulance carried him off. Half MacroWare’s board is ready to pin motive on you, the interloper, a man with the ability to cause the breach. Your neck is on the line and our priority is to save it. Deal with fall-out later.”

  Prioritizing, I excelled at. Choosing between going hungry and running for my life—piece of cake. Graham was dithering over the method of his downfall. “You’re getting soft,” I taunted.

  “I could just disappear again,” he retorted angrily, stopping the video at the speech-making part of the dinner.

  “Or you could clear your name, move on, get a life, get help for agoraphobia, any of the above. Anything I can do, you can do better.”

  “That’s not how the song goes,” he said wearily. “And you are still hiding in the basement.”

  “I’ll happily move into your attic. Look, stop the footage, go back.” I pointed at the screen where Stiles was at the podium, gesticulating. “There, stop there.”

  In the background, the same waitress was quietly clearing the head table. None of the execs looked green yet, although they’d obviously finished their dinner.

  “Herkness scraped off his salsa and he lived,” Graham said, focusing his formidable attention on the scene.

  “Did all five test for botulism?” I watched as the blond VP of PR waved away his plate while seemingly fascinated by his boss’s boring speech.

  “He might just not like salsa,” Graham warned. “This does not make him a suspect. We don’t even know the salsa was the source of the botulism.”

  “But from the medical reports, Herkness is far more likely to recover than the other two—which certainly points fingers at the salsa. You’d better get security on him, whatever the case. And now will you admit that I’m not an idiot, and I know how much to tell my family and when?”

  “I know you’re not an idiot, although spotting salsa isn’t proof. It’s Nick and Patra I don’t trust. I don’t like wildcards. Tudor better know enough to make my agreement worth it.”

  “Tudor is the one who warned MacroWare about the spyhole.” I stood back and waited for that to sink in. “He has some illusion that he notified Stiles directly, although I’m not going to ask how he came up with a private email.”

  “Crap.” Graham uttered a few more choice expletives as he ran through a screen apparently monitoring Stiles email account. So much for not hacking.

  “Search on Kinghenry with a UK address,” I told him.

  Tudor’s email appeared in seconds.

  “He should learn to spell,” Graham said dryly, reading the cryptic text that was more a Twitter hash fest than anything legible.

  “He buried the info in tweets,” I ventured. “Follow the MacroWare hashtag and his signature on Twitter.”

  “I hate working with amateurs,” he growled with a sigh, setting one of his monitors to Twitter.

  “You hate getting old and out of touch. The kids have been using this format to get around Magda’s nosiness for years. Or think they’re getting around it. Who knows if Stiles followed it, but someone might have.”

  He returned to surly mode and ran a search on hashtags to show he wasn’t out of touch, but I could tell I’d hit a sore spot. As Tudor’s panicked message emerged amid myriad other MW hashtag messages, he growled in disgust.

  The once very public Amadeus Graham thought he was his own CIA. He was pretty darned good at it. But as I’d learned to my displeasure, sometimes, one had to live life to learn new things.

  Graham apparently thought he only needed computers. I had made it my goal in life to disillusion him.

  Six

  Tudor’s Take:

  Ana was a bossy pain in the arse, but Tudor was eager to meet dodgy Graham, who played the family strings like a meta-gamer. Ever since they’d learned Amadeus Graham had taken over Grandpa’s mansion, Tudor had been digging into Ana’s rat i
n the attic, but the bloke was impossible to ferret out. Graham had firewalls beyond anything the NSA had ever developed. For that reason alone, Tudor wanted to check him out.

  Nick had said the house and its contents were worth millions, and Old Max had left it to all his grandkids. With his share, Tudor figured he could quit school and start his own software company. But no matter how deep he dug, he hadn’t uncovered anything to get the sod thrown in jail. If Ana hadn’t been able to do it... But she never told him anything, so he didn’t know what she had up her sleeve except lawsuits. He’d be out of school and a corporate drone before they’d be settled.

  EG had begged him to take snaps when he went to Graham’s office—she had never seen their landlord and she was living here!

  But standing in the doorway of Graham’s creepy attic room after breakfast, Tudor was pretty shaky about even entering.

  The man in the chair was big, and the office . . . beyond awesome. Tudor stared like a dork for a full minute at the bank of computer monitors. He could swear one was showing Nick entering the embassy, but it switched to a hospital too fast to be certain. How could anyone watch all those screens at once? ADD much?

  And then Tudor spotted the Twitter screen following the #cookiemonster tag. His stomach sank to his shoes.

  “Would you like to explain the software that allowed you to breach the government’s visa website?” the hulk in the chair asked without greeting.

  Tudor had the weird feeling the man had eyes in the back of his head.

  “The worm was only supposed to remove my footprint,” Tudor replied defensively, glaring at the incriminating evidence on the screen. “No one has the right to keep track of all my information.”

  “There is no law that says they can’t track anyone who enters their website,” Graham pointed out. “Quid pro quo, you want their information, you have to give them yours. You don’t want their information, stay off their website.”

  “I didn’t mean to use it on the visa site,” Tudor said defensively. “I just forgot to turn the program off. But the worm was programmed to only eat my information. It should never have gone past the data folder.” Tudor took a deep breath and asked his greatest fear, “Did it gut anything vital?”