Twin Genius

by Patricia Rice

  She gave a heavy sigh of exasperation. “I wrote an essay comparing the spy cases of the Rosenbergs and Pollard and all she did was correct my commas. I think commas ought to be outlawed.”

  I muffled a snort of laughter, appreciating the teacher’s dilemma at being handed a college-level political essay instead of the few paragraphs on pets she’d probably expected. “Tell Mallard to give you some of his molasses cookies and some hot chocolate as a reward. The cookies are heaven.”

  She made a face but jumped up, ready to experiment with molasses. “We only have room for one more person. Will Juliana be joining us?”

  Snoop. She didn’t know the twins, had no reason to even know of their existence—except she snooped, just like Magda. And me. I’d have to check her computer to find out what files she’d accessed.

  “We don’t know yet.” I wasn’t letting her know there was a mystery at hand or she’d don a Sherlock Holmes hat and be off to find our missing sister.

  I didn’t want to tell her that the sister she’d never known might be dead.

  Nick didn’t show up until after dinner. I’d texted him about Zander’s arrival and that we had a problem, but I didn’t want to put too much out there. And none of us wanted to discuss Juliana in front of EG, so he waited until he knew she’d be in bed.

  Nicholas Maximillian is a brilliant mathematician, card shark, and diplomat. Like many of our nomadic family, he has dual citizenship. He’s the illegitimate son of a British lord, who made sure his son had the education I didn’t have. Nick is male model gorgeous: tall, blond, has a firm square jaw with cleft in it, and sharp Slavic cheekbones. I have the same cheekbones, and so does Magda, so there’s probably some truth to her claim to being Hungarian. She’s about as much a princess as any rich Jewish girl, though. Nick also happens to be gay, although in his diplomat’s finery, only the bright blue ascot gave him away.

  Zander studied him thoughtfully, shook hands, and slumped into the Morris chair without saying a word.

  “Takes after Max, does he?” Nick asked with a grin, settling beside me on the horsehair sofa and sprawling his long legs on what was probably a ten-thousand-dollar antique coffee table. “Magda always said her father could out stonewall a stone wall.”

  While Alexander attempted to puzzle that out, I plopped a paper file folder on Nick’s lap. I loved computers. They’re my lifeline to the world and I knew how to safeguard them. But Nick worked for the British embassy and was only vaguely aware of the concept of encryption, so I had to communicate with him by paper. All embassies come equipped with spies, and I prefer to keep our private life just that—private.

  “Julie is still receiving her paychecks,” I told them, giving them the good news first. I wasn’t certain I wanted to involve Alexander in my conspiracy theories, so I didn’t mention my real concerns. “I want to experiment with the assumption that she thinks her phone and computer are tapped or otherwise watched, and she’s keeping a low profile.”

  Zander’s head popped up with interest. “She’s protecting us as Magda protected us? By staying out of our lives? That’s bosbefok.”

  I lifted my eyebrows and waited expectantly. He dropped his head in his hands again. “Juliana is very, very smart, but not always logical,” he admitted.

  “Protecting family is perfectly logical,” Nick said with diplomatic tact. “If she knows this address, then she knows she can come here if she’s in any danger. That would indicate that she’s safe but unwilling to involve us. We need to give her a secure means of communication.”

  That was a pretty huge leap of confidence, but it made Zander come to life.

  “Can you find out if she still has her phone?” he asked eagerly. “I could text her with coordinates and leave a message for her in a cache near where she lives.”

  “Assuming she still has her phone, if she recognizes your number, will she respond? If she’s protecting you, maybe not,” Nick warned.

  “He could use one of our phones, but would she pay attention to us?” I asked, trying to put myself in her position—which was impossible, of course.

  “We have a code,” Zander explained. “Once we have a cache set up, I’ll text her with just the coordinates. I can do it from an unknown number, but if I make the subject header a Bible phrase, she’ll know it’s me. If she gets it,” he added, gloom descending again.

  A Bible phrase, of course. I really would have to wrap my head around having a pair of religious siblings. “We’ll go out tomorrow and you can show me what we need for a cache. The address she’s using is over in Alexandria. It’s not exactly a forest where you can bury things, unless it’s in someone’s front yard.”

  “Caches can be creative. We’ll find something,” he said with assurance.

  “Leave her a burner phone in the cache,” Nick advised. “They’re pretty much untraceable. We’ll put our number in it. Maybe she can text us that way.”

  Provided she was alive. We could assume she hadn’t been abducted since there had been no ransom note.

  If anyone realized we were actually worth a fortune, then every one of us would be a prime target for kidnapping. I wanted to bury my face in my hands, but I kept a positive expression and nodded approvingly as they made plans with almost no hope of success.

  Chapter 4

  As usual, Graham made no attempt to greet our new family member. The only way I knew he was alive was by the documents and demands flowing into my computer. I’d once worried we’d be flung out on our heads if I didn’t carry through on all his demands. I have more knowledge of his interests now, so they made me curious enough to follow where they led.

  But family came before curiosity. After a night’s restless sleep, I sent EG off to school, then prepared for the day’s outing. I invaded Nick’s old room—he now had his own digs—and found one of his old overcoats.

  I handed it to Alexander, who still looked like a scruffy adolescent to me. “You’ll freeze without a coat. If you’re lucky, Nick left gloves in the pockets. Unfortunately, he won’t cover up his pretty hair, so he doesn’t wear hats.” I could ask Graham, but that was just too intimate, and he’d probably look at me as if I was crazy.

  Zander looked dubiously at Nick’s tailored Chesterfield coat but obediently donned it. He was as tall as Nick but not as broad through the shoulders. He looked like a kid wearing his daddy’s coat, but he was less likely to catch pneumonia than in a hoody.

  Brought up the way I’ve been, I don’t really notice skin color any more than I notice fashion. But I am over-protective. A black kid wearing a hoodie through white DC causes eyes to narrow and attracts attention. I’m all about doing what it takes to blend in, unless I want attention. Zander’s tawny coloring gave him a distinguished look in a tailored coat, but I wasn’t sure about the hoodie.

  I wore my thrift store faux leopard coat, hat, and furred boots. I’d mapped out our transportation—I drive but I don’t have a license—and was prepared to trek out when Graham’s voice filled the foyer like the voice of God. Zander dropped his gloves in startlement.

  “The limo is returning for you,” his deep voice tolled through the chandelier.

  “You can follow us in it, if you like,” I told him in my most pleasant hostess voice. Once upon a time, I used to beat the tar out of his hidden speakers, but I’d learned to live with the intrusions. Sometimes, they were even useful. Or amusing.

  Graham’s manipulation of my life was not.

  “It will take you twice as long by public transportation,” he said in irritation.

  “But Zander will learn how to use the Metro. Anyone can sit passively in a car, isolated from reality. We don’t follow that path.” I’d experienced that isolation the last time the family had been threatened. The suffocating cocoon of the limo had kept me from learning what was really happening, and I hadn’t liked it.

  I opened the massive carved front door and gestured for Zander to precede me.

  He looked bewildered, but that went away the moment we st
epped outside. It was snowing. Like a child, he held out his gloved hand in wonder, catching the flakes.

  My jaded heart warmed. “I take it you don’t go skiing in the mountains.”

  “We never left the village until we went to school in Johannesburg.” He tilted his head back to watch the tumble of flakes from the gray sky. “Now I understand some of your Christmas celebration, even though Bethlehem was a desert.”

  “I thought it got cold enough to snow in Johannesburg.” We trudged down the street. I ignored the limo cruising toward us.

  I could list a thousand reasons why it’s safer to not hand fate to a driver other than myself, but I only pulled out excuses when I was afraid. So that meant I was terrified for Juliana and retreating to my childhood need for control by not taking the limo. I’d been to therapists. I can talk the talk. That doesn’t mean I’ll change. Given my upbringing, I needed to be in charge of nasty situations. Otherwise, I’d been known to blow up buildings to reach my family. I was clenching my fists as I once had as a teenager, and we didn’t even know anything.

  “Snow is rare, maybe only forming in a small neighborhood, and it melts quickly,” Zander replied. “We have much sun in winter. Juliana and I were still in the village the last time it snowed.” He glanced over his shoulder, noticed the massive car turning to follow us, and looked uneasy.

  We were only half a block from the Metro now. I stepped up our pace, and we disappeared underground where the car couldn’t go.

  “If we are wealthy, why can we not take the car?” he finally asked.

  “Do you want the full lecture or the abbreviated one?” I asked, studying the overhead signs and moving down the platform through the morning rush hour crowd.

  “A car would be safer and faster,” he said cautiously.

  “A car would get caught in rush hour traffic and be a perfect target. We’d be trapped inside,” I countered.

  “Do we have enemies?” he asked in understandable horror.

  “In my experience, yes. Do you, or do you not, want to learn how to survive in any circumstances?”

  His father—like mine—had been killed by assassins. Zander looked thoughtful and didn’t question more. We weren’t born to parents who lived in peaceful suburbs and pushed paper for a living.

  My full lecture would have taken the length of our Metro ride and would have been difficult in the crush. I was relieved that he was intelligent enough to catch my drift without argument.

  We only had to run for one train connection and endure the crush before we reached the King Street station. I saw no sign of the limo waiting for us. In this weather, the limo could have been caught in traffic. DC didn’t handle snow well, and it was coming down thicker now.

  The area we strolled through was decorated in evergreen roping and Christmas lights. We had a real holiday happening, which briefly distracted Zander from his gloom.

  “Juliana will love this,” he said, gesturing at a brilliantly decorated, wheeling exhibition of Santa’s workshop in a store window.

  He did not say what I was thinking—if she was alive.

  “All right, let’s find her and make sure she sees it. I want to see the address we have for her. On Google, it looks like an office building.” Knowing any snow this time of year would melt off soon, and hoping Juliana was enjoying it somewhere, I traipsed down the increasingly icy sidewalk. People in hats and scarves rushed by, late for work if they had to be there by nine. The fact that we dawdled, staring around us, made us look out of place, but I didn’t think that mattered—yet.

  I followed the map I’d laid out in my phone, and we located the building with relative ease, if I didn’t count frozen toes.

  Alexander expressed his dismay first. “Yoh, she would not be living in a tower like that! Those are offices, are they not?”

  Yup, it was an ugly concrete-and-glass office building towering umpteen stories above us—not the church or school dorm I’d envisioned.

  “One way to find out for certain.” I dove into the crowd crossing the street and pushed through the glass front doors.

  The lobby had no security desk, just business suits waiting patiently for the elevators. I studied the index and found Joshua Arden’s Christian America Development with a suite on the tenth floor, about half way up. “They’re the only office on the tenth floor. That’s not looking residential. They’d probably be breaking zoning laws to have a dorm up there.”

  “But this is her address!”

  “They must pick up the mail here and deliver it elsewhere,” I said reassuringly. “If they’re working on unfinished projects, that could just mean they don’t have delivery where they are.”

  I’d lived in third world countries where no one had an address. I hadn’t traveled the United States enough to know if there were places without mail. I kind of doubted it, but construction projects sounded third world to me.

  “She was working on the park, yes, but they have classes there as well,” he said in despair, staring at the index as if it would produce answers. “Perhaps we could go up and ask.”

  “A perfectly sensible solution—except if Juliana is trying to keep us out for some reason, we ought to respect that for a little while, until we know more.” And if she was dead and CAD hadn’t told her family. . . then I really didn’t want to be on their radar yet. I’d learned my lesson about barging in and jeopardizing everyone I’d hoped to save. I was into subtle these days.

  He nodded uncertainly. “Can we find out what projects they’re working on?”

  “Only one in the vicinity,” I said with certainty, heading back for the street. I’d already planned this next step. “First, we should buy phones. I don’t want to traipse all the way out there and not be prepared.”

  Graham’s limo was idling in a no-parking zone outside the door. He would know I’d head for JACAD’S office first. He’d also know my ultimate destination. But we couldn’t explore the grounds from a limo, and we’d be darned conspicuous when I wanted secrecy.

  I led Alexander to a store that sold pre-paid phones. He grasped the concept quickly, worked his way through the shelf to find the best deal, and whipped out his credit card. I stayed his hand.

  “Family business, family card.” I added a second phone to our purchase and swiped a card made out to the trust that our lawyer had set up for our funds. The trust had an innocuous name that wouldn’t lead directly back to us without a lot of research and prying into secure documents in a lawyer’s office.

  I had Zander open the annoying plastic packages and charge up the phones with the mobile charger I carried in my faux-Birkin bag. While he was doing that, I opened my cell phone and hit a new app I’d downloaded last night. Then I led him into a Starbucks so we could warm our hands on hot tea—or in his case, coffee—until the anonymous Uber driver arrived.

  With our warm drinks in hand, I waved at Graham’s limo driver, then climbed into the back seat of a Honda Civic. Zander was starting to wear a perpetual expression of perplexity.

  “Can you take us to the entrance of Jesus World?” I asked.

  “I can get you close. The road isn’t finished yet,” the bearded driver said. He looked a little rough around the edges, like a man who’d seen things he’d rather have not. I pegged him as ex-military, out to make a few bucks for Christmas. I approved of the entrepreneurship of the new company and the driver. So, call me an anarchist for being cheap and supporting independence.

  “Close is excellent.” That meant unfinished areas with no nosy housewives watching us while we looked for a place to cache the phones. “Do you know anything about the project? Know anyone working there?” Another benefit of locals over limo drivers—the locals gossip.

  “One of the guys I went to high school with drives a dozer for them. Says they pay good money, but the work keeps getting held up and is moving slow,” the driver obligingly informed me.

  “Any work is good in this economy.” I sipped my tea and waited. I checked his name and number to store in m
y files.

  “Tell me about it.” He went off into a rant about jobs going overseas, and I tuned out.

  Ignoring the driver, Alexander cuddled his hands around the hot cup and watched the city pass by. “And what do we learn by taking this car instead of the other?” he whispered into a lull.

  “That we don’t need a limo to get around. They’re not always available when we need one,” I said in satisfaction, glancing over my shoulder to see the long black sedan following far behind. By now, I was mostly annoying Graham for my morning fun.

  Zander looked impressed when I showed him the app on my phone. He figured out my hotspot, pulled out the burner phones, and added the app to both. As I’d hoped, my little brother was naïve, not stupid.

  By the time Zander had phone numbers and apps loaded into both burners plus our normal mobiles, the driver had taken us into the countryside and stopped at a gate. Only the name of the construction company adorned the locked gate on the park’s chain-link fence, but in the distance, we could see the monstrosities rising.

  Mostly, the so-called attractions were wood and metal skeletons, now covered in a dusting of snow, creating spectacularly eerie gray images rising from what appeared to be open graves for giants. It was impossible to tell a dinosaur from a disciple. But we could make out the foundations of a merry-go-round, the steel of a roller coaster, and the remains of an old-fashioned Ferris wheel with only three seats. Apparently the park wasn’t averse to acquiring used equipment.

  I assumed they’d be adding camels and donkeys to the merry-go-round, and the roller coaster would someday be a fun ride across the Red Sea. I wasn’t sure how one transformed a Ferris wheel.

  The Uber driver rolled away. The limo was nowhere in sight, thank heavens. Graham’s driver was an older man, like Mallard, and trained to be discreet.

  “Trailers,” I said, nodding in the direction of a row of tin cans on wheels and a concrete-block store, complete with showers and propane tanks for sale. “The park will probably have a fancy campground when the project is finished instead of the hotels they have at Disney World.”