“Besides national security?” Graham asked dryly. “No, it seems to have been content with destroying only the data level where user information is stored. One hopes that was backed up elsewhere and that they shut down before the worm could attach itself to other documents. Just the fact that you breached the State Department’s firewalls is chilling enough.”
Thankfully, the room was too dark for anyone to tell he’d been sweating. Tudor swallowed a lump of relief. “But someone with real spyware could have gone in through that hole and stolen all the info, right? That’s what I told Stiles.”
Graham dialed up a screen showing Stiles’ personal email account, the one Tudor had turned up from his hacker buddies. He opened up Tudor’s coded email. It looked pretty pathetic up there on the wall.
“Stiles is dead,” Graham said bluntly. “He died soon after he had the software tested and found the holes in the websites you told him about. He found more.”
Tudor grokked that Ana thought Stiles had been murdered because of the spyhole. The stories he’d read had said food poisoning. He didn’t think he was important enough to have been personally responsible for the death of his hero, but he would gladly take down anyone who might have done it. He asked warily, “And what do you want me to do?”
“Go to MIT, get out of our hair, don’t show your face here again,” Graham said. “But what I want and what I need aren’t necessarily the same, as your sister has so crudely pointed out.”
“Yes, sir,” Tudor said with caution, not entirely understanding. “I don’t have the funds to visit MIT. Does that mean it’s safe for me to go home? I can ask Ana for a loan.”
“No, it’s not safe for you to go home, not with your fine hand all over that Twitter account.” He gestured at the screen before working some magic with his keyboard and making all the messages disappear, leaving the Twitter screen blank.
Tudor watched in awe as Graham ran a search on the tag he’d just deleted and nothing showed up. He’d wiped the tag clean from the public Twitter database. How was that even possible? Well, it wasn’t, entirely, but the copies would be buried so deep in such obscure places, someone would really have to know what they were doing to find them.
As if he hadn’t just performed magic, Graham continued, “I would recommend eliminating all your social media accounts and lying low, preferably forever. A mind like yours is a frightening thing.”
“Yes, sir.” Tudor wasn’t certain where this was going. His people skills often failed him. “Ana told me not to use your network, though. Should I go to a library?”
Graham kneaded his forehead before speaking. “No, you cannot leave the house until we find who killed Stiles and why. That person is ruthless, and if his motivation had anything to do with the security breach, then you’re in danger. You will delete all trace of yourself using a computer not connected to this network. I will set up a new identity through a server in Uzbekistan for your use. Send me a copy of your damned monster program, and keep it out of the O/S breach this time. Once you’ve eliminated your social media, start tracking who has had access to the affected software.”
Uzbekistan? Tudor gulped and nodded. “Yes, sir. I don’t think my tablet will do the job, though.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t think I can let you out of my sight with anything more dangerous than a tablet. If you want a full computer, you’ll have to use that one over there.” Graham tilted his head toward a corner of his workspace.
Tudor widened his eyes. “Here, sir? I’ll be working here?”
“Safer than a jail cell, anyway.” With that, Graham returned to work.
***
Ana ponders the impossible
My mailbox boiled over with Patra’s curses and pleas for information on whether Graham knew Stiles or anything about the murders. I figured if I left the mansion, Sean would pop out from behind light posts. Our nosy reporter wouldn’t dare actually knock on the door. He had issues with Graham that I didn’t totally grasp.
Since Graham’s preference was complete silence, he wouldn’t deign to speak to anyone, much less journalists. I had to be his portal and choose what information to give out, and when. Right now, all Patra and Sean were doing was grasping straws based on the CNN video, old photos of Graham, and insider knowledge of Graham’s obsessions that no other reporters possessed.
Our bargain was that I fed them what I thought they could use without mayhem and destruction, and they helped me dig into files I didn’t have the time or expertise to comb through. Right now, they didn’t have anything I wanted.
While Graham interrogated Tudor, I dug through the files that had come in overnight. Graham either had a spy or spyware inside police headquarters, because all the police files were here along with media reports, hospital reports, and anything else Graham thought relevant.
If I was having difficulty keeping up with my last remaining on-line clients, Graham must be having a devil of a time, given the ton of information in this folder. He couldn’t have slept at all.
Sifting through, I learned that the police had received the first rushed lab reports about the botulism poisoning. They now realized what we knew first—this was not a mundane case of fish poisoning. I read panic in the terse sentences.
I couldn’t read the hospital reports as easily, but it seemed the three survivors were hanging on. Herkness was doing better than the others, and his lab reports tested lower on botulism, so the salsa was probably the culprit, if the dinner remains were any evidence. Stiles and Bates did not rise from the dead and walk the halls like zombies from puffer fish overdose. The botulism on top of fish poison had made certain they were good and dead.
I did not read anything I didn’t already know since, until botulism came into play, the Department of Health and not the police had been doing the investigating. I needed to read the reports from the DOH. I had to think beyond what the police would do so we weren’t duplicating efforts.
I wasn’t held back by the regulations the police had to follow.
We might have a twenty-four hour head start until someone learned that Graham was probably the last man to talk to Stiles before the CEO was hauled off to the hospital.
The police didn’t know about the security breach—yet. What I really needed was to be inside MacroWare, to see who Stiles had told about the previously unknown spyhole in their all-powerful operating system. Hackers were always finding new holes in browsers, but in the system itself . . . I thought that might be something totally new. And in undistributed beta software—almost totally impossible.
I e-mailed Graham to ask if he’d lowered himself to hacking into the company’s internal network yet. I got a message back from Tudor saying he was on it. I tried not to gape in astonishment.
Fine, we were all on the same page. Next.
I went through the Department of Health reports and found the names of the kitchen staff who had been there that night.
Reading the report, I’d say if Graham hadn’t intervened, the killers would have won a Get Out of Jail Free card. Accidental puffer fish poisoning would have gone on the autopsy report of five wealthy men.
It was Saturday. Few employees in the DOH would be working today unless they were on emergency calls. I rifled through Graham’s files from the health department—rudimentary at this point. Fugu chefs are trained in excessive cleanliness. The instant the soup had been served, the pot and all utensils, including the cutting board, used for the soup had been scrubbed with special cleaning compounds.
According to the health department reports, Adolph Nasser, the head chef, asserted that the fish guts had been properly disposed of per regulations. This involved wrapping them in layers of plastic and taking them off to be destroyed by chemicals—burning doesn’t kill the poison. They’d tried to question the soup chef—one Hiroko Kita—but he’d left work on the day the DOH showed up and wasn’t answering the phone. I didn’t see any evidence that the police were getting a warrant, so they might be in touch with him by now.
One of my specialties is tracing people through the sticky web of computers—it’s paid the bills on many an occasion. I ran Hiroko Kita through the routine and discovered he’d not been with the kitchen for long.
Suspicion alerted, I ransacked the hotel’s personnel files—even an amateur hacker can slide into most of those. Human Resource departments tend to be run by extroverts who like to talk, not people who care about passwords or computers. All I needed was the hotel’s email address, an HR employee’s name, and after a couple of tries—the password 4people. I sighed and shook my head at the predictability.
Skimming through Hiroko Kita’s slim file, I noticed he had been recommended by Tray Fontaine, a chef on the west coast. Tray didn’t give an employer, so I looked him up—he ran the fancy dining room at MacroWare’s corporate headquarters. Who knew nerds got their own chefs?
Having MacroWare’s chef send a puffer fish cook to serve poison soup to MacroWare’s execs certainly sounded... fishy... to me.
It was a wee bit early to call the coast, so I dug into Tray and Kita’s backgrounds a little more. I didn’t find anything that appeared potentially blackmailable on either of them. I wasn’t planning on blackmailing—unless I thought it was necessary—but chances were good that whoever wanted Stiles dead might have coerced one or both of them into helping.
I can’t help it. That’s the way my mind works. Blackmail and money are the grease that turns the wheels of governments—why not corporations as well?
I could tell from the files falling into our shared cloud account that Graham and Tudor were tracking down hotel security staff and happily erasing Graham’s existence from the meeting room. I’m more of a let’s-get-the-bad-guy person. I wanted to talk to Kita before the police got there.
There was a nine-year-old fly in my ointment however.
EG would be sulking because Tudor wasn’t there to play with her. Nick had taken off to have his own life and couldn’t keep her entertained. She was capable of amusing herself—but a miffed EG should never be left alone.
Our grandfather’s portly butler Mallard had unbent enough to accept our presence, but I couldn’t continually strain his goodwill by making him babysit.
Hiding in closets and sneaking around is my preferred modus operandi. That’s impossible while dragging a child around. How does one query kitchen staff about a missing worker without going undercover?
Pondering, I dug deeper into Kita, since he at least lived on this coast. The police report showed they’d looked for him at the address in the hotel’s records. My eyebrows shot up when I checked my quarry’s credit report and found a recent inquiry from a landlord at an address in the Adams Morgan neighborhood where Nick was currently residing. The street was slightly north of here and not exactly a cheap place to live. How much did fish chefs get paid anyway? Well, since he was called a poissonnier, maybe he got paid for the fishy title.
I looked up the hotel, which was toward the center of the city—not a bad commute by Metro.
I texted EG to ask if she wanted to see the National Geographic Museum, which was near the hotel.
She texted a sneering emoji. Okay, so she’d seen the museum a few times.
The zoo was on the upper end of Adams-Morgan, not precisely near Kita’s address but a few stops away.
ZOO? I texted.
I got a pouting emoji in return. Tough luck, kid. It wouldn’t hurt to cruise Adams-Morgan, see if Kita had moved in. He might hide from the police, but me with a kid...? Pity it wasn’t Girl Scout cookie season.
I texted Nick and warned him we were headed his way. I’d told him repeatedly that I wasn’t taking full responsibility for EG, that he had to shoulder his share. He’d agreed. We needed to rope Patra in, but she was just out of school and needed to try her wings. As the eldest of our tribe, Nick and I were the ones who had decided to settle down.
I sent Tudor a map of the area we were heading into and asked if he wanted to go to the zoo. His reply was explicit and impolite. Teenagers are so predictable—but he’d know where we were if we ran into trouble.
I threw a few of my favorite spy tools into a tote and went upstairs to pound on EG’s door. She’d let her bangs grow out, and the purple dye had faded. She now appeared to have blue-black raven wings clipped back from her face. She had Magda’s dramatic cheekbones and big green eyes that would slay dragons in a few years. Right now, they narrowed suspiciously at my tote.
“I’m not staying with Mallard,” she stated flatly.
“You will if I tell you to, and if that’s your attitude, that’s what I’m inclined to do,” I said cheerfully. “But if you’ll lighten up, we’ll go exploring before the zoo. Get your walking shoes.”
“It’s November. It’s forty degrees out there. Who goes to the zoo in winter?” But she was already hunting under the bed for shoes.
“Fewer crowds, good exercise, it will toughen you up. Want me to tell you about the winter we spent in Russia where we didn’t need a refrigerator, we just kept food on the windowsill?”
“Yeah and how long it takes to thaw milk. I’ve heard that about a thousand times. Tell me what we’re really doing.”
“I’ll let you know when I figure it out.” I watched her drag on furry boots and suffered a pang of envy.
EG had to go outside to school every day, so I’d bought her warm clothes. I’d been living in Atlanta last winter and hadn’t needed boots. I never left my office here if I could avoid it, so I hadn’t bought warm footgear. I glanced down at my wooly socks and sandals. “Maybe we should go shopping instead of the zoo.”
“That makes sense. Let’s get Nick,” she agreed eagerly.
My little sister was showing dangerous signs of following in our glamorous mother’s footsteps. I’d gone the opposite direction, probably because I couldn’t compete with our mother’s blond beauty. I’m short, my hair is inky, and I turn nasty when men stare at my boobs, so I hid them. Mostly. Today, I was wearing a man’s fisherman’s sweater because I couldn’t find one in a woman’s size at a reasonable price. With luck, I could tuck my braid in a knit hat and be androgynous.
That hope lasted until we stepped out the front door and ran into Sean O’Herlihy at the gate.
Seven
Ana goes visiting
“That was Graham entering the hotel where Stiles was killed, wasn’t it?” Sean asked, joining us as we walked toward the Metro. “You do know Stiles was murdered, don’t you?”
A little history—Sean’s father and my father were Irish terrorists together. They died at the same time as Graham’s father. Sean and Graham both had connections to my grandfather and possess a deep-seated neurosis about bringing the bad guys to justice. I’ve learned to trust both Graham and Sean, for different reasons.
Other than his insane obsession with digging into Graham’s activities, Sean was a decent guy, and not bad looking. He had a head full of sexy black curls and big blue eyes that could float ships. I’d fancied him for a while, until I realized he was more brother than boyfriend. I think he likes Patra, but there’s nearly a ten-year age gap between them, so their relationship remains long distance.
“Hello to you, too,” I said, striding briskly for the Metro. EG rattled her gloved hands along the wrought iron fences and ran ahead of us. “Lovely day for the zoo.”
“Dammit, Ana, I thought we were friends. Why not give me the scoop? There are already rumors flying that Graham was up for a position on the board. Until that news clip showed up, no one even knew for certain he was alive. If he was in that hotel that day, the police will be all over him before sundown.” He paced angrily beside me.
“You want me to sp
eed them on their way? Do you think I’m an idiot? We’d be out of a home by sundown.” Knowing that Graham’s story was why Patra and Sean were breathing down my neck—they not only knew he was alive but where he lived—I’d given the problem some thought. Sean had been extremely helpful in the past. I wanted him on our side. But I wouldn’t screw around with Graham either. Much.
So I’d have to give them something just as ripe. Graham, the paranoid hermit, would probably bust a gasket at my revealing any info, but that was his problem.
“As usual, you’re working the wrong side of the street,” I told him. “I cannot confirm this—I’m not a Macro employee—but Stiles and his execs were sitting on a potential national security nightmare. Contemplate who would want that covered up.”
“Everybody from the president on down!” he practically shouted. “Rumors don’t cut it. I need facts.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t clone myself, so I needed his help as much as he needed mine. If I fed him just enough, we could work out a trade. “That takes time and work. You can tag along with me, or you can hang around the hotel restaurant and see if the missing chef’s fellow workers will spill anything about him.”
“The puffer fish chef is missing? How do you know that?” he asked in good journalist fashion, not giving away whether he was just curious or disbelieving.
“The same way you would if you’d bother with tedious detail instead of hanging out on street corners trying to catch Graham flying through windows. He’s an agoraphobic recluse, not Dracula.” Well, some days he liked to be Batman, but that was an inside joke involving EG’s interest in bats and my scorn of Graham’s superhero tendencies. The man is capable of laughing at himself.
We’d reached the Metro station. I grabbed EG before she could disappear into the crowd. “You go one way,” I told Sean, “and I’ll go the other. We can keep in touch,” I suggested, hopefully.
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