“How do you plan to carry a tree to the house?” Sean asked in amusement when he heard our request. He had grown up in DC and knew more about this tree stuff than we did.
“Your MG obviously won’t carry it,” I said. I had unpleasant memories of flying down the interstate in that antique convertible abomination.
“There’s a tree lot only half a mile away,” Tudor said through a mouthful of saffron pilaf. “We could carry it.”
I quirked a dubious eyebrow at him, but he was too engrossed in his food to notice. He wouldn’t be the one pounding city streets with a tree on his head. The skinny geek couldn’t lift a box of ornaments.
“If the snow had lasted, we could have made a sled,” Zander suggested.
“Wagon,” EG cried. “We need a wagon.”
As ideas went, that wasn’t a bad one, better than suggesting the Metro anyway. “And we’ll find a wagon where?” I asked. “And if we manage this feat, how do we set a tree up in the living room without it toppling through the window?”
“The leaky, thousand-year old window,” Patra added unhelpfully.
Zander almost gained some color as he joined the family discussion. For a few rare minutes, he was enjoying himself instead of worrying about his twin.
None of them knew to worry about Graham and Mallard.
When it came time to pay the bill, I used the family credit card. They all watched in awe as I signed away the extensive meal for seven people with wine for four. Even in the out-of-the-way places, DC is not a cheap place to dine out.
“Will Oppenheimer send us statements on the trust?” Nick asked, referring to our trust lawyer and checking the numbers on the bill as I hadn’t.
“He can, although we’d be better off hiring a financial manager now that it’s almost finalized.” The house was the big sticking point. It needed to be in the family trust as well—except Graham’s name was still on the deed.
Zander glanced up from the burner phone he’d been checking all evening. “Investing is what I do, although for a firm in South Africa. Perhaps I could have my employer recommend someone here.”
Nick and I shared a look. As the eldest, we’d been the family money managers for years. Since we’d never had enough money to lose, Nick’s brilliance with math had led down the dangerous trail of gambling. He’d saved our hides more than once with his card sharping. Neither of us had any reason to know anything of investments.
“That’s an excellent idea,” I agreed noncommittally, but the mental gears were grinding. I much preferred a family member overseeing family funds, but Nick and I were lousy at it.
“You need to set financial goals,” he said in all seriousness. “I can help with that.”
Patra and Sean were donning their coats. Tudor and EG were scarfing up leftover desserts. They listened, I know. They were just signaling disinterest in money management. I knew the feeling.
Nick nodded almost imperceptibly. With his approval, I was free to distract Zander from his twin with our finances, or some small portion of them.
“Come along, lovebirds, I’ll buy you drinks in this new dive I found down the street.” Nick straightened his cashmere scarf and gestured at Sean and Patra, leaving me with the under-21 group. I didn’t care that I was missing out on adult conversation. I had my family working together and safely in one place—except for one. I needed to get back to my office to find her—that was the only Christmas present I needed.
We took the Metro home. The earlier slush had frozen to ice. No one had thrown out salt on our doorstep. I could feel the house deteriorating already in my inept hands.
No one had turned on the lights or lit the parlor logs. Entering a cold dark house, I felt abandoned, which was ridiculous. Gritting my teeth with determination, I located switches, ordered everyone to take their coats to their rooms, and followed them up as if I meant to go bed, too.
I worked at my laptop in my room until I heard the house settle down. No messages had appeared from Graham in my absence.
When I was assured everyone was in bed, I grabbed a flashlight and started up the stairs to the attic, terrified I’d find it empty.
Chapter 6
Sitting at her desk in the empty office, nervously editing the dangerous photo on a phone she’d “borrowed” from a sleeping security guard, Juliana sent the image fragments to her cloud account. She prayed that neither IT nor security had the imagination to piece together a dozen puzzle pieces, especially since her files were already full of images and designs. Mostly, she prayed they didn’t know about her cloud account.
Until she had the photo printed, she wouldn’t risk contacting Zander.
“You’re working late, Miss Kruger,” a familiar voice chided.
She fought a guilty start, hid the phone in her skirt pocket, and reached for her purse. Her pulse beat anxiously. “I was just leaving, Reverend. Hunting for the right image is time consuming, and I feel guilty doing it on company time. Could I help you with anything?”
“I was just checking to see that the snow hadn’t caused any harm and saw the light. I don’t think you’ve taken a night off since you arrived. Don’t you want to go out and learn more of this country?”
Joshua Arden was a handsome older man with the powerful build of the football player he’d once been before a knee injury had ended his career. He had a megawatt smile that could light a room. She’d heard him preach and knew he could persuade as convincingly as he could bellow condemnations. Tonight, however, he looked like a weary man on his way home after a day’s work. A baseball cap bearing the sign of a cross covered his famously golden hair.
“I’m more interested in learning all I can about bringing education to those who crave it,” she said honestly. “I won’t be staying in this country where you have so much, so I don’t want to become too attached to your ways.”
He nodded understandingly. “You’re young and still believe you can single-handedly change the world. We need that energy. But part of your education should be learning the larger world around you, meeting people who can help you.”
She knew that, but the privileged attitudes of the material world offended her. Still, she couldn’t tell Reverend Arden that she’d never be able to network. “I’m sure you’re right, sir,” she answered obediently.
“One of our sponsors has given us tickets to the symphony for tomorrow night. I insist you take one, Miss Kruger. It’s a holiday program, and I think you’ll enjoy it.”
She liked that he took the time to learn everyone’s name. She had been thrilled when she’d learned the school often offered free concert admissions donated by the park’s charitable founders. She had hoped one day to be recognized for her hard work and offered this kind of opportunity.
Her soul longed for the beauty of music, a glimpse of soaring architecture, and paintings from a world she’d never visited.
Instead, knowing what she did now, her spine froze at his command. She tried to tell herself that he was simply trying to reward her hard work. But as far as she was aware—and she’d studied the matter closely lately—those coveted tickets only went to women: young, pretty, and white ones. She would like this gesture to prove she was wrong, because she was darker than Zander and very definitely not white.
“That’s so kind of you,” she gushed. “I would grab one in a minute, but I promised to sing for First Baptist tomorrow. Evan over in accounting loves the Messiah, and he’s been a bit homesick lately. Why don’t you offer a ticket to him?”
Was he looking at her with suspicion or approval? She could never tell with this man. His smiling public persona hid whatever he thought behind a mask of assurance.
She hoped he wasn’t the monster who stalked the campus, but she couldn’t imagine anyone else in his organization who had his power to kill and get away with it.
Finally giving in to curiosity, I climbed the stairs to Graham’s office later that night. Entering, I contemplated the blank monitors on his office wall with a degree of relief. At leas
t this time he hadn’t moved them out. A month ago, Tudor and I had discovered this room scoured clean, all trace of him gone, and I’d almost had a panic attack.
Now, Graham’s blank monitors were like monuments to dead computers. Maybe Graham had family—or a girlfriend—he’d gone to visit for the holidays. He could have given Mallard the weekend off.
I didn’t play boyfriend games, mostly due to lack of experience. As my therapists had told me, I was too emotionally distant for close relationships. But had I wanted one. . . No point in going down that path. Graham was making it quite clear that he was even less available and more damaged than I was.
I searched for evidence that he’d left his cat behind. My allergies were already kicking in, so it had been in here recently. I didn’t find so much as a bowl of water or a flicking tail. Where could he have gone with a cat?
Refusing to worry about a man who lacked the courtesy to inform me of his departure, I took the hidden stairs down to my office. I had come to rely too much on Graham’s resources. I needed to go back to developing my own.
Opening the Cobalt Whiz, I dug around online, then sent out a few feelers to people I thought might help me crack phone records. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope, but I refused to feel helpless without Graham’s speedier access.
Graham was the covert center of a highly credentialed security agency. I had no clue how far his web reached, but it included a satellite connection or two, and back doors into various government agencies and police records. He had full access to the computer I worked on, whereas his was completely encrypted. My access to his feeds had been cut off. I was on my own.
And I didn’t like it.
Returning to primitive Google searches and human contacts was like a step back in time to a different century. It frustrated me that he would disappear at a crucial moment like this, when one of my family could be in jeopardy.
I couldn’t even sic Tudor’s hack program on Juliana’s cloud account since I had no inkling how to get into her specific information. Frustrated on all personal levels—I even dug into her email and social media without success—I started back on JACAD. I’d already discovered connections to the shady Top Hat sponsors I’d encountered unpleasantly, some months before.
CAD’s corporate board included Archie Broderick, head of a media conglomerate, and the Goldrich who ran a nationwide mortgage company. Both of their monolithic companies teetered on the brink of collapse after they’d been caught in corporate wrong-doing of a gargantuan nature. They had more on their hands than a Jesus park, so even if they were on the park’s board, I didn’t see them as an immediate threat.
Neil Hammond from Hammond Oil was related to EG’s father and another of the corporate sponsors. I didn’t know anything bad about him except oil companies are notoriously corrupt. So I’ve already admitted I’m a bigot. It happens.
George Paycock and Tony Jeffery were on the park’s board. CFO and CEO of General Defense, respectively, they represented an enormous weapons company. I thought that made them strange bedfellows with a religious community that presumably preached the pacifist views of the New Testament, but I’m not much of a church goer. I’ve just read the Bible.
I had to look up the last member, Edward Parker III—a professional dilettante with a trust fund.
Maybe I could have Zander dig deeper into the board and their financials. I wanted a smoking gun. Tonight, I went for a broader approach.
I started with newspaper files on both the Reverend Joshua Arden and his community development organization. Joshua had his own church, his own TV network, and numerous other enterprises, most of which he’d inherited from his retired evangelist father. I didn’t have the resources to investigate all of them. Since Juliana had gone to work for CAD that was the one I concentrated on.
The good reverend preached an ultra-conservative spiel that appealed to the far right-wing religious fanatics who believed people of other faiths were infidels, traitors, and worse.
As a citizen of the world, I recognized that most folks preferred living in a familiar community, one they understood, such as a church of like-minded people. Unfortunately, one simply cannot force the entire world’s population into one’s own narrow image, no matter what your creed.
Joshua’s church believed in strict adherence to the Bible—apparently they liked the idea of the world being created in seven actual days, ignoring all the scientific impossibilities involved.
I couldn’t quite figure out if they thought the Garden of Eden was populated with pterodactyls, but that was their problem. I just needed to understand why Joshua had poured so much money into building a dinosaur Jesus park near DC, one of the most expensive, sophisticated, educated, international communities in the world.
For one thing, I surmised as I studied photos of the groundbreaking, he’d caught the attention of a lot of conservative politicians who were the fronts for extremely wealthy lobbies, corporations, and gazillionaires with their own agendas—few of them holy. Joshua’s predominantly rural and poor congregations had votes and used them—and they swung conservative.
The park itself seemed as harmless as a Disney production.
Joshua’s ambitious effort to spread his word through schools in third world countries was naively misguided, but he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to propagandize in the name of education. If Juliana wanted to build schools, more power to her.
I found an article describing how CAD brought in promising young people from around the world. They employed these student interns in different areas, on different projects to round out their education. Along with the downtown office, they had buildings at the park and scattered around the city. It seemed to be more like on-the-job training combined with programs on how to raise money, find teachers, encourage communities to provide school rooms, and most importantly, convince them that children needed education.
I was totally on board with education being the solution to many of today’s problems—teach a man to fish and he’ll never go hungry made sense to me. Hand-outs merely taught people to stick their hands out, although there was room for helping those who couldn’t help themselves, I supposed.
I was tired and going in circles.
At the very bottom of my search list were some tiny articles that didn’t even include CAD in the headlines. I almost skipped them. But I’d been trained to never leave a task unfinished, so I opened the first one.
It contained a small column from the local paper about a girl found strangled near the Potomac at the beginning of November. She had quit working for CAD a month prior to her death.
Except for the date, that wasn’t enough to set off alarms about CAD. Cities were dangerous places. From everything I’d read so far, CAD provided secure quarters and working conditions. They couldn’t be blamed for a student who quit and went astray.
That Juliana had quit communicating at the beginning of November could be coincidence.
Not until I opened the next article did I experience a frisson of fear.
A family had reported their daughter missing after she’d been with CAD for a few months. That had been eight months ago.
One dead, one missing, and Juliana not communicating—not a good track record for a religious community.
The third article reported a man’s remains discovered in a shallow grave by CAD workers on the Jesus World grounds during excavations in October. He’d been dead since spring.
I pictured the huge empty construction site filled with mounds of dirt, deep excavations, and the steel bones of preposterous creatures rising from cement foundations.
I have an active imagination and too much experience in death to see anything except a graveyard for victims in that image. The church as the new mafia. . . I shuddered, even though the possibility seemed preposterous.
Now I really had a reason to worry. I’d have to start planning an invasion of CAD headquarters or sic the cops on them if Juliana didn’t respond to Zander’s message soon.
My culinary talents extended to making French toast. Egg-dipped bread and syrup might not be the gourmet delight Mallard produced, but it satisfied all the hungry mouths around the kitchen table on Saturday morning.
“We found a platform wagon on Craigslist,” Tudor reported as he shoveled soggy bread toward his mouth.
Without Mallard to scowl at us, my family had spread out like the undisciplined louts they were. The table was covered in tablets, newspapers, books, hats, and other debris.
“There’s a Christmas tree lot just a few blocks from here!” EG reported. “Nick said he’d help us. We can go through the storage rooms in the basement and look for decorations!”
For all I knew, Max had stored dead bodies down there. I sipped my tea without immediately replying.
Zander had bags under his eyes deep enough to bury tree and wagon. He’d evidently been up half the night, searching for his sister or sending coded messages to every media in existence. I had to find Juliana alive just so I didn’t have to inform him that she was anything else.
“Zander and I will hunt ornaments,” I decided, bringing EG down off her dictator high. “You and Tudor can choose the tree, keeping in mind that the ceiling may be twelve feet tall but we have no ladder, and Nick does not have the strength of giants. Under six feet should be plenty.”
“You just don’t want us in the storage rooms,” EG declared, quite correctly.
“I don’t want you staggering around with boxes containing what might contain priceless glassware or Magda’s childhood memories,” I countered. “And if you want a tree, you have to work for it by helping Nick.”
“Where’s the attic chap?” Tudor asked. “He could carry a tree without blinking an eye. And there’s that motor out in the garage. Wouldn’t it hold a tree?”
Tudor had worked hand-in-hand with Graham the last time he’d been here. I’d had foolish hopes that Graham would keep Tudor’s cyber-terrorist bent reined in.
Twin Genius Page 5