Twin Genius

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by Patricia Rice


  So, I’m a bigot like the rest of the world. I despise ignorance, and it was showing in my spitefulness. I actually approved of camping over high-rise hotels, but I was scared and wary and didn’t have anyone to punch to make me feel better.

  Zander shivered in his dress coat and studied the rough piles of dirt, equipment, and materials being buried in a blanket of snow. Then he turned to examine what remained of the trees on what had probably once been a lovely farm. “The cache first?” he suggested. “And then I send the coordinates?”

  “You’re learning.” Not seeing any good excuse for climbing the construction fence, I trudged with him into a copse of half-dead trees, trying to figure out how anyone could find anything in a jungle of dead vines and bare branches. I’d lived in cities much of my life, occasionally a desert or two. I was as ignorant of the countryside as Zander was of DC. “I didn’t think they had forests in South Africa. How will you know how to create a cache?”

  “We have trees in parks in Johannesburg. They are not like this, however.” He studied the vine-covered stumps and limbs. “If I send the coordinates only to Juliana, I don’t think it matters that we find a clever cache. We just need a place of concealment.”

  He glanced at the plastic bag from the phone store. “Will this protect a phone from the wet?”

  I pulled a gray waterproof envelope from my bag. “I came prepared.”

  He wrapped one phone in the store bag, then in the envelope, and folded it until it wouldn’t fold more. It wasn’t exactly a small package, but flat enough that it shouldn’t be too difficult to conceal. I was starting to get the picture.

  We traipsed through the meager woods, scuffling paths in the snow that gradually filled behind us. Alexander finally focused on a clump of saplings around a lightning-savaged tree trunk. Pulling out a pocket knife that should never have been allowed on whatever plane he’d flown in on, he pried off the rotting bark around a crevasse in the trunk. The gray envelope blended in with the old wood beneath the stripped bark, and he dug at the crevasse until it was deep enough to hold the package.

  When the saplings fell back in place, the hole was completely concealed. We recorded the coordinates of the location from our phones, then hurried back to the street. I checked, and the snow continued to fill our footsteps. Somedays, I seriously believed in a Great Spirit watching over us.

  Graham’s limo was waiting out on the main road. Figuring Zander had learned enough, I opened the door and climbed in. Zander’s hands were practically shaking, whether from the cold or anxiety, I couldn’t say. I politely tried not to watch as he composed a message on his new burner phone.

  “Home, miss?” Sam, the driver, asked.

  “Yes, please,” I said, already mentally listing all the directions my research needed to take when I got there.

  I heard Zander’s message send and prayed that Juliana still had her phone.

  “Can you also email her? Is there anywhere else you can leave a message?” I asked as he clasped the phone between both big, bony hands as if praying over it.

  He nodded. “I brought my tablet, but should I do it from a neutral computer?”

  “Yes, from a new email address under a different identity. If you mean to use social media to send messages, you need to start new ones with the new address and keep logged out of your usual ones. I’ll set up my laptop in the library and you can connect with our internet.”

  I’d used the library as my office until I’d appropriated my basement hideaway. The aging library was as dark, cold, and inhospitable as the parlor, but it had a gorgeous table that could hold dozens of computers. And it was on the first floor where I could keep an eye on him, if needed.

  Traffic had cleared out by the time we cruised the streets toward home, and we made reasonably good time. It wasn’t lunchtime yet when the limo let us off in front of the house.

  I raised my eyebrows at the figure sprawled on the front step, backpack cluttering the three-inch lawn. Tudor was so engrossed in his tablet that he didn’t look up when we approached.

  I kicked his combat boot. “You could have told us when you were coming.”

  “I flew stand-by.” He reluctantly shoved his computer in the pocket of his old army coat and stood up. Coming from the UK, he was at least appropriately dressed for the weather.

  Tudor Bullfinch is our sixteen-year-old computer genius half-brother. His father is an Australian shipping magnate married to his third wife who prefers to keep the peace by sending his son by his first wife, Magda, to boarding school in London. Tudor has his father’s carrot-red hair and like everyone else in the family except EG, stands taller than me.

  “And Mallard refused to let you in?” I inquired, taking out my key and opening the door.

  “No one answered the bell,” Tudor replied. “I didn’t think it polite to sneak in through the tunnel.”

  I fought a frisson of fear as I unlocked and opened the door to our secure cave.

  The house echoed oddly empty. A cold chill crept down my spine. In these last months, I’d become accustomed to coming home to Mallard’s greetings and Graham’s snark. They hardly ever left the house together. Where had they gone?

  Chapter 5

  Juliana labeled the graphic of the pyramid granaries, and Baby Moses in his basket among the reeds, and sent the image to the mainframe. She wondered why mummies were stored beneath grain but history and science didn’t interest her. She was here for one purpose only—to learn to build schools. If the cost of that education was working on Reverend Arden’s park, she would happily pay.

  But if there were hidden costs, as she feared, she needed to know about them. Before opening the next screen, she looked around at the other student interns bent over their keyboards, working on their own tasks. None of them were watching her.

  Pretending to stretch her back, she glanced up. The office manager usually slipped out for a smoke about now, although no one was supposed to know that. She hid her relief—Mrs. Overcamp was nowhere in sight.

  Furtively, she went on-line, called up last night’s surveillance videos—both hers and the park’s—saved them to a cloud account, and deleted her history. She wasn’t certain when she would have time to watch all of the footage. Security was tight, and she had reason to believe she was watched.

  Retrieving a dead-tree document from her desk in-box, she opened a comparable form in her computer. She kept that screen large and visible while she opened a smaller screen. Typing in her password, she checked her online email notifications. She knew the account wasn’t secure, but she couldn’t help checking once a day. Mostly, it was spam these days, and she could ignore the box.

  She almost closed the screen on what appeared to be spam from an unknown sender—until the subject clicked in her tired brain—Revelations 3:4.

  Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. Geeky Zander loved to tease her with that quote when she wore white. Zander would use Tardis when he quoted it, of course.

  Verifying no one watched, praying IT wasn’t sophisticated enough to store keyboard strokes, she opened the message, and her heart raced a little faster. Embedded in the quote were the capitalized letters N and W, with numbers inserted as if they were verses. Could Zander be sending her coordinates? To what?

  The message had to be from Zander. How? She didn’t recognize the address.

  Memorizing the combination of numbers and letters worked into the verse, she deleted the email without reply. With luck, the Bible code would prevent anyone from understanding what Zander was telling her. That was unnaturally devious for a straight arrow like her brother.

  Could she hope he was here in the States? She couldn’t imagine it, not with his new job, but perhaps he’d found help nearby. She didn’t know if electronic listening devices could tell what she was doing if she were to use her phone with the GPS tracker to test this location. Best not to try.

  She knew the instant
Mrs. Overcamp returned because the stink of cigarette smoke preceded her. Why did smokers think they could conceal their habit? Couldn’t they smell themselves?

  The general contractor, Mr. Gregory, arrived to inspect some document on Mrs. Overcamp’s desk. He was a burly man, smelling of the outdoors and dressed for the cold, alien to the indoor students bent over their desks. The presence of authority made her nervous.

  Julie hastily cleaned out her history again. She would make them work to find out what places she visited.

  Plotting how she could copy an image from her cloud account without revealing her use to security, and where she could find an unbugged phone, she returned to rendering artistic images of what she now thought of as tombstones.

  “Tudor, you’re home!” EG cried happily as she returned from school the afternoon of Tudor’s arrival. She dropped her colorfully-decorated purple backpack next to Tudor’s grungy one in the foyer. The shabby modern bags looked incongruous beneath our grandfather’s antique Waterford chandelier and polished Sheraton table.

  Mallard would have a fit, if he were here. He wasn’t.

  Nervously I set down a tray of hot chocolate-filled mugs on top of the glossy magazines laid out decorously on the coffee table. Tudor and Zander were playing video games and getting to know each other, and the parlor was the most comfortable location. Mallard would have had a conniption at my serving food in his precious parlor. I was almost begging for him to emerge from the woodwork and sniff in disapproval.

  There had been no sign of Mallard in the kitchen. We’d made our own lunch.

  Worse, there had been no missives from Graham waiting in my inbox. Graham worked 24/7. I couldn’t remember a time that he hadn’t been pouring documents into my box, even when he’d been in hiding.

  Six months ago, this lack of intrusion would have made me deliriously happy. Now—I was frightened.

  I’d had plenty of years of therapy to recognize my abandonment neurosis. I didn’t want to admit it. If I started including Graham and Mallard in my family circle, I would never know peace again. I refused to go to the attic to check on them—which was probably even more neurotic but believing they deserved their privacy was my way of dealing with paranoia.

  “Now we can find a Christmas tree,” EG cried excitedly. “Can Nick come with us? What about Patra?”

  A Christmas tree? Where had that come from? We’d never ever had. . . . Oh. They’d never had Christmas, so of course they wanted one.

  I glanced at the boys. They looked up expectantly, then at my expression, ducked their heads and returned to their games.

  Were they hoping for a real old-fashioned picture-book family Christmas? That thought terrorized me almost enough to drive out my worries over Graham. I had absolutely, utterly no experience at holiday celebrations.

  Dang it, Nick had agreed to help me with this family business. And Patra was expected to join in now that she was in town. I didn’t want the responsibility for everyone’s happiness—as well as their safety—on my scrawny shoulders.

  “I’ll call them,” I said neutrally, making no promises.

  But even I had to admit to a degree of anticipation at the possibility of a real Christmas tree. This old Victorian parlor would be perfect. . . .

  If I started thinking of this place as home. . .

  Growing up, I’d had too many expectations dashed to allow my hopes to rise. Mallard and Graham’s disappearance and my fear for Juliana easily damped any incipient excitement over a silly holiday.

  I would have to buy gifts. Well, I’d already stored one or two for EG. She was just a kid. But a tree. . .

  Deep breath. “There’s not a lot of room in here,” I said, looking around as if they’d asked for a TV—which would, no doubt, be next.

  “We could push the sofa down the wall and put the tree in front of the window,” Tudor suggested offhandedly—which meant they’d already discussed this, and he’d been thinking about it.

  Email made it easy for them to gang up on me long distance.

  “We don’t have decorations,” I reminded them.

  “Mallard said we have old ones in the storage room. And we can make our own,” EG cried excitedly. “Popcorn strings and sugar cookies!”

  If Graham wasn’t here. . . I tried to think positively: my workload would lighten considerably. I’d already quit advertising my availability as a virtual assistant weeks ago so I’d have more time for EG and for Graham’s projects. If I didn’t have Graham’s work to do. . . I would go stark raving berserk. If Mallard didn’t arrive soon, I’d have to tackle Graham’s lair.

  “Drink your chocolate before it cools,” I ordered. “I’ll talk to Nick and Patra.”

  Patra Llewellyn is Magda’s daughter by her second husband, my father being her first. Our mother had married at seventeen and been widowed at twenty-one, so she had some excuse for going through husbands like bottles of wine. The affairs in between. . . were none of my business.

  Patra had recently graduated journalism school, helped break a major scandal involving a notorious media mogul, and had just taken a new job in DC. I didn’t entertain sentimental notions that she did so to be near us. She had her eyes—and other body parts—set on Sean O’Herlihy, a hot investigative reporter for our local newspaper.

  Coincidentally or not, Sean’s father had died in the same car bombing that had killed mine and Graham’s. We came by our conspiracy theories honestly.

  I left the boys rearranging the furniture while I trotted back downstairs to my basement office. Mallard would walk out on us again should he ever return and see what we were doing to his museum. He revered my grandfather and preferred to leave everything as it had been in the good old days—like last spring.

  The chances of actually reaching Patra and Nick by phone were almost nil, so I cc’d them both on an email explaining what I wanted—saved me the trouble of explaining to two voice mail boxes.

  Then I returned to hacking Juliana’s phone account. Her phone bill was still being deducted from her funds, and it was sizable. Surely she’d bought a U.S. chip when she’d come here. If she wasn’t calling family, how could she be running up a bill that high? I finally located more passwords buried deep in the documents Zander had copied from her computer. Holding my breath, I opened the website for her carrier and typed in an ID and a password that looked promising.

  The account opened on the first try. After studying her bills inside and out, I had to admit defeat. She was paying for unlimited data, which was very expensive. There were no extra costs for phone calls out of the country. Her biggest charge appeared to be for cloud storage. I’d need to crack that next.

  What I really needed were phone records to see who she’d been calling, and when and where, but that information doesn’t appear on statements. For that, I needed Graham and his illegal resources.

  I checked my mailbox. Still nothing from him. If he was in danger, did I really want to know? I told myself that if he had Mallard with him, he wouldn’t be anywhere unsafe. He was just being his normal secretive asshat self, and I really needed to smack him for being so inconsiderate, but I wasn’t his keeper.

  I tried every ID and password on Juliana’s list and none of them opened any account in the cloud storage website listed on her bill.

  Frustrated, I glared at the screen and heard my stomach rumble. Lunch had been whatever leftovers Zander and I could scrounge. We would have to go out for supper. It wasn’t as if I ever fixed my own dinner, much less one for four people.

  Fortunately, feeding a family wasn’t as fraught with anxiety as fighting terrorists.

  Family—I had a family again. I didn’t know whether to celebrate or weep. It just needed Magda’s arrival to push me over the edge, and I’d pack my neuroses and vanish into the snowy night.

  I texted Nick and Patra of my dinner plans. Patra actually called back.

  “Can Sean come too or is this a super-secret family do?” she asked without greeting.

  “If you wi
sh to inflict your entire family on him, sure, let him tag along,” I said wearily. I’d have to start considering adding in-laws to the family table. I was feeling overwhelmed.

  “Entire family?” she asked warily. “Magda is here?”

  “Not yet. Want to place wagers on when?”

  “Christmas morning, guilting us for not buying her anything by arriving with her arms full,” she replied without hesitation. “I get your Berkin bag if I win.”

  I didn’t tell her it was a fake, because she was undoubtedly right.

  We met at a Moroccan restaurant off the beaten path to keep down expenses. I refused to feel guilty for not buying thousand-dollar dinners out of our family funds. We all needed to learn to manage our new-found wealth and channel it for good instead of wasting it.

  So far, I hadn’t received a lot of resistance to my stinginess. Of course, so far, they had no idea of how incredibly wealthy we were. Our grandfather Max had been a wise investor and a bit of a miser. I could relate to miserliness when money was short, but not when people were starving and homeless, and he had funds to spare. I had some philosophic processing to do.

  Patra arrived on Sean’s arm. She has our mother’s tall, buxom good looks and extroverted personality. Sean is a Pierce Brosnan look-alike who caused heads to swivel. They would make an elegant pair—if they hadn’t still been wearing the jeans and cheap nylon coats they’d worn to work. Despite Patra’s tacky clothes, the waiters still raced to help her with her jacket—she’s that gorgeous. With that figure and face, she belonged on TV news, but she had a mind of her own, and her heart belonged to her daddy’s profession of investigative reporting.

  Nick and I had already decided he would stay after dinner to explain Juliana’s disappearance to Patra and Sean. It wasn’t a subject we wished to discuss in front of EG and Tudor. EG was already prone to gloomy predictions, and Tudor could be a mercenary cynic. They needed to see happiness and healthy relationships to give them more positive outlooks.

 

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