“Or Superwoman.” I glanced down at my phone and Tudor’s text, then up at the window. “My car’s arrived. Keep me in the loop, and I’ll do the same.”—Up to a point, I amended mentally as I stood.
Sean didn’t gape as I left him for the gleaming black sedan outside, but I liked to believe he was internally gawking—because I was. I knew Graham was filthy rich and accustomed to limos and maybe even Air Force One. He and Mallard had picked us all up in a Phaeton after one dangerous evening. I was pretty certain Graham had not taken the Metro to the hotel the night he met with Stiles. So apparently he had a car regularly in service, like all the other D.C. diplomats.
I had a sedan at my disposal. How cool was that? The luxurious leather black seat concealed by smoked glass was almost as relaxing as my private hidey-hole. Here, I could look out on the world and pretend I really was invisible.
But invisibility wasn’t always useful, especially if Tudor’s future was on the line. I wasn’t sure I trusted Graham to protect my brother before himself. I didn’t know how messed up his head was, and he didn’t owe us anything.
While I pondered world—or at least, familial—domination, Graham actually deigned to call me. I stared at the phone in incredulity. We were hitting new firsts all over. His masculine baritone grumbling in my ear generated a visceral thrill.
“Interesting hiding place for your hard drive,” he said in greeting. “I’ve provided a better solution so you don’t have to make people suspicious with an empty computer.”
“You’ve been in my office again,” I said accusingly, knowing I’d locked my door.
“I kept the cat out,” he offered without repentance. I’m allergic to cats and he had a bad habit of letting his into my room when he sneaked around. “Delete this number from your phone. I have Tudor’s number set up to show as your mother in Poland. Use that to reach either of us.”
“Aye, aye, mon capitaine,” I mocked. “I want inside MacroWare. Can you arrange that?”
I was nuts asking for that. I didn’t work well with others. I wouldn’t know programming code from Mandarin. But I couldn’t send Tudor into a nest of vipers, and I needed faces to put to names.
“Possibly,” Graham agreed with reluctance. “The hole appears to be in random versions of the new beta software they’re testing—or maybe not so random. I need to process their files to see who arranges the distribution. The leaks are only planted in DC sites currently, so I’m concentrating on the local sales office.”
“No apparent connection between the sites affected?” Knowing I was thinking people and he was thinking computers, I added, “Same repairmen, salesmen, IT department, anything?”
“Huh, I’ll get back to you on that.”
I gave an unladylike snort as he clicked off. So, we were both so messed up that we understood each other. Scary, but workable.
My mother’s lack of success in the relationship department prevented me from ever thinking about finding a permanent partner. Note, it did not keep me from thinking about sex, and currently, Graham was the only man stirring my hormones.
The car dropped me off in front of the house. The driver gave me his card in case I needed him again. If he was billing Graham, I’d certainly consider it. I liked the anonymity of the Metro, but sometimes, speed was a factor.
I hadn’t eaten lunch and headed for the kitchen when my phone pinged again. I opened it to a text from Tudor.
WORM INSIDE NSA. DATA ANNIHILATED. I’M GONNA DIE.
Ten
Cynically thinking that total annihilation of NSA’s spy files couldn’t be all bad, I continued down to the kitchen. Tudor’s frantic cry barely registered on my personal Richter scale. Teen boys were always going to die. It was an adolescent hazard. I didn’t intend to handle world domination on an empty stomach.
We’d known the cookie monster had fallen into government servers and done some damage. It must have done more than Tudor had known for him to go ballistic.
I had paid just enough attention after 9/11 to understand that Congress had passed incomprehensibly complex laws allowing our own government to spy on every single citizen in the country and probably the world if they were feeling particularly paranoid that day. Since I could only take care of myself, not the stupid among us, I did what I had to do to prevent privacy invasion at the time. Until recently, I hadn’t even owned a cell phone.
Graham had apparently gone even further. He’d erased his existence from cyberspace.
Leave it to Tudor to wipe out the entire populace—or just their mindless phone conversations. I was hoping that the worm had only consumed data from his Brit servers—which would be whatever he and his fellow boarding school nerds had been up to these last ten years. A nice size package, but not the Holy Grail. I had no way of knowing the actual extent of the destruction from his panicked text, but I assumed the media would soon be blasting doom and gloom if the NSA’s entire database had been destroyed.
Mallard was nowhere in sight when I reached the kitchen. A lovely salad with a slice of grilled salmon on top was neatly covered and waiting in the refrigerator. If it was meant for Graham, tough luck.
Carrying the salad back to my office, I took a break from crime solving.
First, I investigated the external hard drive that had been added to my Whiz. All Graham’s Sooper-Sekrid files had been transferred into the removable drive, leaving the Whiz showing only my virtual assistant accounts.
Graham and I had come to uneasy terms over sharing information. He left his satellites open for my use. I didn’t try to use them for anything dangerous. I had my old Dell laptop for my more personal files, but we both knew we could access anything the other did if we wanted to bad enough. Mostly, we were too busy to poke into each other’s business, and neither of us had a private life to hide.
I really didn’t want the cops messing with some of my admittedly shady clients, but it would look strange to have a blank computer. The external would easily pop out and go into my hiding place or my tote. I moved my private email files into it as well. Graham might not care if I’d been hunting my missing siblings in Africa, but the police might get wrong ideas if they saw my sources.
For my lunch break, I checked on personal matters. I studied the Swiss bank account files that Graham had sent me. He’d apparently copied transfer slips from our grandfather’s bank account before Rotten Reggie took it over. The number of digits to the left of the decimal point on each slip was gratifyingly enormous, well beyond my ability to spend immediately. If the money actually existed, we could educate our entire tribe, including the missing African twins, and still buy back this house from Graham.
We’d be the ridiculously rich I sneered at. I’d figure out how to handle the irony when it happened. Investing the million in funds we’d already retrieved was difficult enough. I needed it to be safe, but I also needed it to grow to achieve all our goals. I chewed nails over every stock market mood swing. This MacroWare glitch wasn’t making my nervous stomach very happy.
I returned to admiring dollar signs. I had no clue how to hack Swiss banks, but at least these transfers narrowed down the accounts to two different firms. I sent questions about finding lost passwords or accessing old accounts to some of my Swiss contacts and e-mailed the banks with similar inquiries.
Salad consumed, I turned back to the files Sean had sent. The dossier on Adolph Nasser, the hotel chef, was pretty much as he’d said—a few drunken driving convictions, complaints from former employees, a checkered employment history. I didn’t think this was highly unusual in the restaurant industry.
Adolph had worked briefly with MacroWare, before Tray Fontaine’s time and only as a line chef. Apparently Stiles didn’t like drunks on his staff. The date of one of the convictions on the west coast coincided with his departure from MacroWare and his hire in D.C. as the hotel’s head chef. That had been a couple of years ago.
Since Adolph had come out ahead in that deal, I couldn’t see why he’d carry a grudge worthy of killi
ng anyone, but I opened my summary case document and added him to my suspect list.
MacroWare’s private chef, Tray Fontaine, looked like a golden boy who could do no wrong. Graduated from a fancy west coast culinary school, interned under a chef even I’d heard of, he took his first big position at an L.A. restaurant known to be frequented by Hollywood stars. How he’d ended up operating MacroWare’s private dining room was unknown. Sean had noted that Patra was looking into it.
I went back into the hotel’s employee files and searched on “Wilhelm.” I didn’t find anything. Interesting. Biting my thumbnail and narrowing my eyes at the screen, I put together a few scenarios in which “Wilhelm” might not show on employee rosters—none of them legal, if that was his actual name.
Had the mysterious Wilhelm been working at the hotel Wednesday when Stiles was poisoned?
I sent an email to the hotel’s HR department from my Patty Pasko, accountant, address asking if Wilhelm “Nasser” was employed in their restaurant, using the chef’s last name to catch their attention. I hinted that “Wilhelm” might be in for a windfall. Hey, if phishing worked for Nigerian bankers, why not me?
Next, I dug around in the police files Graham had been sending me. Nothing new on the medical front. The PR guy who didn’t like salsa had emerged from his coma and still wasn’t talking much. It had been hotel staff who had mentioned the ambulance had been called to a meeting room hired by a Thomas Alexander.
Thomas Alexander, huh. Graham had said he’d booked the meeting room, but naturally, he wouldn’t use his own name. I made a note to check out his alias, just to see where he’d picked it up.
So, why had the police shown up on our doorstep asking for Graham if they only knew about Thomas Alexander?
I dug deeper and discovered the PR/salsa guy, Herkness, had given the cops a list of people who were supposed to meet after the dinner. He hadn’t given Graham’s full name. He’d just listed him as Day—short for Amadeus—and said he was head of a security team Stiles had hired. He’d clammed up when the cops had asked him why the outside security team had been needed.
MacroWare wouldn’t want news of a spyhole in a test program to go public. This whole case stunk of cover-up.
It had actually been the FBI that had connected the dots between Thomas Alexander, “Day,” security, and Graham. The police files didn’t provide how they’d made the connection. I only saw the transcript of the phone call between the feds and the police captain who’d come knocking on our door. So they really didn’t know anything and were on their own phishing expedition.
No wonder the good captain had showed up personally and backed off so easily. It hadn’t been my acting abilities that had driven him away so much as his doubts and distrust of another agency.
My ego could take the blow. And distrust didn’t mean the cops wouldn’t follow through. Without my cooperation, they just had a really tough job getting a warrant on this crummy bit of speculation. They’d have to dig deeper.
I sent Graham a message asking for Thomas Alexander’s files, just to annoy him.
Most of the files on Kita provided details of what I already knew or guessed. His faulty immigration papers prevented him from working at MacroWare, but Kita had worked with Tray Fontaine in several of his restaurant ventures.
Tray’s statement to the police said he’d hired Kita as an independent contractor upon occasion after Stiles developed a taste for Asian dishes. When Tray had heard Adolph needed a poissonnier, he’d promised to send MacroWare’s business Adolph’s way if he hired Kita.
That call sounded perfectly legit, the good-old-boy network alive and well. Of course, that network often involved blackmail, bribery, and the usual male score-keeping, so I couldn’t totally disregard the connection, especially given Euan’s hints of sharks and immigration papers in return for favors.
So far, the police had determined that Kita had been shot with a high-power Magnum handgun and a silencer. He’d been gunned down in the apartment and shoved into the closet—a professional job. In a town filled with wealth, spies, and military, a professional hitman was feasible but required sharks with lots of money.
I was enjoying that fishy image too much.
A few weeks ago I’d come across a professional hit job sponsored by a mysterious cabal called Top Hat. Sean and Patra had helped me catch the local Mafia connection, but we couldn’t touch the wealthy bad guys who did the hiring.
And so far, I couldn’t pin down a connection between a purportedly good corporate executive like Stiles with the rotten greedmeisters in Top Hat.
The police interviews with the rest of the hotel’s kitchen staff were less than enlightening. Stiles’ server, Maggie O’Ryan, claimed not to know the new fish chef’s name. Even Euon’s interview merely said Kita was a hard worker who tested his soups before serving. She didn’t mention that they were old friends.
Poor Kita had no public mourners—which didn’t mean there weren’t private ones. The information trail I needed to follow wasn’t on paper or in computers. If I’d learned nothing else since coming to D.C., it was that I had to hit the streets far more than I liked.
I had pretty much spent the last ten years in Atlanta researching from a musty basement, sometimes 24/7. Hibernation was fine when the research involved ancient history and nothing more vital than someone’s PhD thesis.
But we were talking Tudor’s life and career here, not to mention that of a hardworking chef and a couple of gazillionaires. And Graham. Sitting still, reading other people’s research, just wasn’t cutting it.
Since MacroWare had yet to publicly admit the flawed beta-ware, I worked on the assumption that Stiles had died over the discovery of the spyhole Tudor had reported. It didn’t make logical sense just yet, but it was all I had.
Someone inside MacroWare knew where the bodies were buried, so to speak.
I was about to dig deeper to see what the police had found on Kita’s phone and computer when my mobile rang.
The screen didn’t display the caller, which wasn’t unusual. No one I knew revealed their phone identity, although I had EG and Nick’s numbers in my contacts so I could recognize their calls. But the international phone code was warning enough that it was my mother. I debated not answering, but Magda and I had developed a truce when she’d allowed EG to stay here. I owed her the respect of listening.
“Is Tudor there?” she demanded the instant I answered.
“Who’s asking?” This was not me being snide. This was me knowing Magda wouldn’t sound this upset if she’d learned on her own that Tudor wasn’t where he should be. Someone had told her. Given the multiplicity of her government contacts, I could only guess which one.
She let out a sigh, signaling that she’d got my unstated message. Most families have their own shorthand communication. Ours was more like telegraphed code.
“My line is secure, so it doesn’t matter who asked. I just want the answer,” she said.
“Tudor has proved that no computer is secure,” I warned. “Some dangerous people want his discovery covered up. He’s safe, for now.”
“The state department is looking for him,” she admitted, revealing her source. “I can get him out of the country. Just let me make the arrangements, and I’ll get back to you,” she said briskly, with no obvious relief.
I rubbed my brow. The feds had already called Magda—so very not good. Wasn’t that just a little far beyond paranoid?
But this was business as usual for our mother. She’d find a friend of a friend who would provide a military helicopter that would fly him to an undisclosed base and disappear him in a jungle somewhere, where he could probably bring down the internet in truth.
My goal was to break that pattern. “He’s been accepted by MIT and Stanford. He’s going to school, not living in jungles,” I informed her.
“Don’t be ridiculous. What does Tudor need with school? They need him more than he does them. He’s far better off—”
“He’s sixteen. He may
have a skull full of complex gray matter, but he has no clue what he wants out of life. If he wants to run around playing spy when he gets older, that’s fine. Right now, he gets a home and an education until he’s had a chance to study his opportunities. Heaven only knows, half the countries in the world could use his skills just to update their antiquated websites. He could unite all the health organizations and get them communicating with each other. Wouldn’t that be more useful?”
“Not if he’s in prison,” she said grimly. “Or blown up by people who think he’s too dangerous.”
“That’s your experience. You made your choices for your reasons. Nick and I were forced to follow along when we were too young to do otherwise. But we have other choices now, and I intend to let the kids explore them.”
I’d run away from my half-siblings when I’d been too young and helpless to save them, and they’d been breaking my heart. I was older now—and not quite so helpless. I might not have a real education, but I had a better grasp of what I could do. They could still end up breaking my heart, but at least I would know that I’d done all that I could to give them the best life possible.
Magda went silent for a few seconds, digesting my argument. It was similar to the one she’d lost over EG. Our mother wasn’t dumb, just defensive. “You call me the minute the pigs get anywhere near my boy,” she finally said in her best menacing tones.
“I will teach him to respect the authorities, until such time as they don’t respect us,” I corrected. “I prefer working within the system.”
“You prefer manipulating the system,” she retorted. “Just don’t let Tudor get taken. How is EG?”
“Excellent. She’s enjoying all her studies and teachers. And she’s no longer wearing Goth black. She’s starting to explore fashion as well as dinosaurs, medical anomalies, and geometry.” I gave Magda those tidbits to chew on so she wouldn’t start in on the sad state of American education. “Nick is doing brilliantly at the embassy, and Patra seems to be settling in at CNN.”
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