Undercover Genius

by Rice, Patricia

  “Oh my, sir, a true pleasure.” Patra would have bobbed a curtsy if her skirt allowed. His attitude seemed to demand it, but mostly, she wanted more time to study this man her father had despised. He appeared distinguished, impatient, and wealthy, like hundreds of men she’d met in her mother’s company. “Yes, Mr. Smedbetter just hired me for entertainment news. I have a few useful connections.”

  “Excellent, excellent. Our company supports loyal, hard-working employees. I look forward to seeing your work.” He walked out, a busy man who should never have been in HR at all. Strange.

  Dragon lady dismissed Patra with a packet of material. An intern led Patra to her desk in the cubicle farm.

  Apparently, access to the computer network wasn’t immediately granted. Patra had to read the packet of material to determine what it would take to enter BM’s precious archives — seniority and a security pass. Damn. She needed Ana’s hacking expertise. Or maybe she could fly in their little brother, Tudor, the computer genius.

  How the devil could she upload her interview with Rhianna if she couldn’t insert a USB? Of all the paranoid…

  She rolled her eyes. Of course, this was Broderick Media, supporter of the Party of the Paranoid, who hired generals instead of journalists. If one believed their stories, they feared everything from communists to alien invasion. Straightening her short skirt, she approached the senior manager.

  In his thirties and wearing a wedding ring, he still ogled her legs before he straightened his glasses and found her face. “Miss Llewellyn, what can I do for you?”

  “Give me permission to upload my interview with Rhianna? I don’t see how I can work the late hours required for the international news if I can only access the computers during office hours.” She confiscated a spare chair and wiggled her hips into it, bringing his gaze to breast level. She hoped he wouldn’t drool.

  “Rhianna?” She’d startled him into actually looking at her. “You have an interview with Rhianna? She never gives interviews!”

  Patra smiled sweetly and held up the USB. “She does to old friends.”

  She loved watching him swallow his tongue. Without another word, he plugged in the USB, uploaded her files — she had only the interview on there because she wasn’t dumb — and opened the document.

  “You can access it now,” he informed her, skimming the interview to verify the contents. “Just bring any files you work on at home to me, and I’ll load them for you.”

  What a pain. Instead of expressing her disdain, she smiled again, took the USB back, and gave him another wriggle as she rose and thanked him. “Do I have access to an email account? I’ll have to communicate with my Hollywood list somehow, since most of them are sleeping at this hour.”

  His eyes widened in appreciation. “I’ll arrange an email account and access to the Internet. Don’t use them for personal reasons. Everything goes through a secured server and is monitored.”

  “I used to work for the BBC. I understand that,” she said gently, humoring him, even though she was lying. The BBC had never paid a bit of attention to whom she was talking.

  She swayed off to purportedly play with the interview, which was already as good as it was going to get. She needed to be able to email Ana or Tudor for advice in hacking the archives, but how could she do that without being caught?

  She sent off a batch of legitimate queries to the people Rhianna had recommended. Entertainment news was easy with the right connections.

  Investigating media corruption was a whole other problem.

  Before she could figure out anything, an email arrived in her brand new box.

  Don’t look now but Big Daddy’s watching you was all it said. The sender was one SAdams@bm.com.

  She didn’t have to look. She’d already noted the two-way mirror near the ceiling on the far wall. When had distrust begun ruling the workplace? Maybe she could write a psychological study on the debilitating effects of fear.

  If SAdams didn’t fear his email would be read, he must be one of the IT guys reading it. Cool.

  Twenty-one

  When I returned from dumping the workload of Bill’s vault on Sean, I found an email summons from Graham. I ignored it. Graham was probably steaming that I’d given all that material to reporters, but the truth just wants to be free. Graham is stingy.

  I knew I was daring the lion, but speed was of the essence. I didn’t even have time for a horizontal tango if he’d offered. My family was in danger, and nothing came between me and them.

  First thing I did when I was back in my office was call Oppenheimer. He hadn’t liked my earlier threat and refused to come to the phone. “Look,” I told the receptionist, “I have a witness who might be able to identify Reggie’s murderer. I can call the cops, or your boss can talk to him first. Ask him which he prefers.”

  Oppenheimer picked up the line. We had a polite discussion about Lemuel. Rather than reveal his location, I set up a meeting so everyone could have a nice chat in a safe place. I was hoping a lawyer could arrange Smythe’s arrest without having to involve me. I preferred Graham’s obscurity to notoriety for lots of reasons, but security is a major one. Oppenheimer was welcome to the credit.

  In exchange for my information, our lawyer generously revealed that we might have a chance of getting some of the yacht insurance in a few months — after the court debated which of Reggie’s debtors ranked highest on a long list. At least a court wouldn’t consider claims from his drug dealers.

  The odds of reclaiming our half million still didn’t look good from my perspective. We needed to find out who blew up the yacht and sue them. Not sounding much better. If it was Reggie’s pals, they wouldn’t have visible assets.

  Family business completed, I finally inserted Bill’s CD #1143 into the DVD slot of the Whiz. Graham could snoop if he liked. I’d give him that much.

  I listened carefully, but if these were the voices referred to in Bill’s memo, I couldn’t identify two of them. I wouldn’t recognize the voice of the current vice president. I certainly didn’t recognize one from years back when I’d been in Timbuktu or buried in my Atlanta basement. I recognized a reluctant respect from others on the tape who spoke to Voice #1. Assuming Bill’s email analysis applied to this recording, I assigned Voice #1 to the vice president. The date on the digital file was five years ago, but if this was a copy of a tape recording, I didn’t know if that was when it had been originally recorded.

  Bill’s email analysis had simply named the VP, Broderick, Senator Paul Rose and possibly a voice on a speaker phone. I recognized Rose. He was all over the media these days. And I recognized the “speaker phone.” Graham. How could I not have guessed?

  I checked my time-line files. Graham had been dismissed from his cushy government job in early 2002, a victim of PTSD from the terrorist explosions of 9/11/01, according to rumor. Some months later, Dr. Smythe had left his advisory job with the Veep to create the R&P. And Riley had been charged for tapping the Veep’s phone line.

  I did a quick Google search on some of the names and events being discussed on the tape. The al-Askari Mosque had been bombed in early 2006. The Hay al Jihad massacre occurred in July. So the file was from after that time period — like about the same time as Patrick Llewellyn’s death. He had died in the Mideast a little over five years ago. My pulse beat a little faster.

  So Smitty — no longer in the veep’s office but head of R&P — had consulted Bill Bloom for scientific verification of speakers on a recording he probably shouldn’t have had. How had he obtained it and why? And how did Patra’s father work into any of this — besides dying in that war zone.

  Not all of the conversation on the tape was clear. Some of it was decidedly angry — especially the voice I had to assume was Broderick. Accusations of political dirty tricks flew. Hardly anything new. I perked up when Graham accused Broderick of using the media to promote war for the sake of the defense industry and oil companies. That was kind of old news now, except Graham punched them with facts instea
d of just making baseless accusations. Very nice.

  And then Paul Rose said Broderick was working in the interest of national security and Unnamed Speaker Phone would be tried for treason if he released data only accessible by the military.

  “Since no one in the presidential office or media would listen, I gave that data to Patrick Llewellyn,” my desk lamp said, interrupting my concentration. “He took it and added it to the files he was working on the Brit end of the manipulation. And then he died, along with thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians.”

  I didn’t hear regret in his voice, but he was talking through wires. Graham didn’t do personal well.

  I rocked in my chair a little after the line went dead and decided that wasn’t sufficient information. Patra’s father had died for this data? And that’s all Graham could tell me?

  I put one foot in front of the other and climbed stairs from basement to attic to beard the lion in his den. Graham’s door was open. He was in his chair when I entered. He was monitoring street scenes outside both Sean’s office and Patra’s — two media centers.

  “You had clear-cut evidence that this country went to war, spent gazillions of dollars and thousands of lives, nearly bankrupted the poor and destroyed the economy, for the sake of corporate greed, and you didn’t give that evidence to the world?” I asked in a deceptively calm tone. “And because of that, Patra’s father died?”

  “Five years ago, I didn’t exist,” he said without looking up. “No one believed me when I left office, and they wouldn’t believe me after I’d been off the map for so long. Your grandfather told me to have a more objective, more respectable third party look at the data. Llewellyn was as objective and respectable as it got. He was right there in the field.”

  “And he died. You think Broderick and Senator Rose killed him to keep him from reporting their greedy operation?”

  “Nothing’s that simple,” he said scornfully, still focused on his monitors and keyboard and not me. “You know that. There won’t be a single trace back to them. The entire United States Congress voted for war. Do you think they’d admit they were manipulated?”

  I hated politics. I didn’t bother voting because I thought all politicians were self-serving crooks. But I’d known some of those soldiers who had died in Iraq. I’d been in some of the embassies that had burned in the Mideast. And that had been Patra’s charming, intelligent, handsome Brit father who had been murdered by our side.

  “The voices on Llewellyn’s recording are not Rose or Broderick but probably their minions,” Graham said. “Llewellyn could have been killed for stealing someone else’s story for all we know. Maybe an angry husband killed him. Just because he knew too much doesn’t mean he was killed for that knowledge.”

  “I’m taking Broderick down,” I warned. “No man should have that much power. You must have still been around when Dr. Smythe left the VP’s office to help found the Righteous and Proud. Five years ago, he was the man who paid Bill to analyze a private conversation with a different VP. Why would he do that?”

  “If you don’t understand politics well enough to know that, then stay out of this, Ana. Keep your sister out of it. And keep that damned pest O’Herlihy out of it or Llewellyn won’t be the only one who sacrificed his life in vain.”

  Graham infuriated me on a hormonal level as well as intellectual. I wanted to pound his head for the sheer relief of releasing my pent-up frustration. But here’s the thing… I would defend my family with my dying breath — and take his head off if he threatened them — but in this case, I agreed with the damned man. I didn’t want friends or family hurt for politics. Talk about frustrating!

  “Knowledge is power,” I threw at him. “And murderers go to jail. You’ve been in the spy business too long.”

  He donned his earphones and tuned me out. I was officially dismissed.

  I walked out. Reluctantly, I admit. But we weren’t going to get physical in a computer room, so there was no point in my staying. Every cell in my body screamed in protest as I raced back to my mouse hole. But I’d had a lot of practice in controlling myself. Graham would know it when I decided to let go.

  I didn’t like coincidences but the whole case lacked good motivation.

  Remembering the partial license plate Patra had got off the limo that had been at Bill’s apartment, I pulled that up on the screen. Graham had apparently already run the partial and matched it against DMV records. D.C. was overrun with vehicles that could pass for black SUV limos but only three had the combination of numbers that Patra had caught on her phone. Out of those three, one was registered to an embassy, another to a local businessman, and the third to a limo service owned by Salvador DeLuca.

  My resources were limited. I was going to profile this one and start with DeLuca. He’d been mentioned in the papers as a suspected crime boss. Thugs who broke into apartments struck me as more likely to come from the old-fashioned gangster school than an embassy.

  If I’d been a cop, I’d have brought Smythe, this DeLuca person, and Toreador, the arsonist, down to the precinct and put them in the same room for questioning. I think that would have been a lot of fun. Instead, I had to start running searches on DeLuca and Toreador to find connections. I wanted gunman Harry’s last name so I could draw him into this too, but all I could do was keep an eye out for any stray “Harry” in my search. Unfortunately, Google couldn’t turn up a list of gunmen in the D.C. area and gangsters are real sloppy about not having websites. My virtual research unfortunately has limitations.

  I called up the video Graham had copied of the street interception that had allowed the stolen car to hit Bill. The Hummer had muddy plates and the angle was all wrong for the camera to catch any numbers. But I could tell it was a D.C. plate, which narrowed the search, if I could hack the DMV for car titles. I could see the advantages of being a cop, except for the abide-by-the-rules part. After wasting an hour attempting every back door I knew, I still couldn’t get through to the DMV.

  I had the fingerprints Patra had snatched from Riley and his goon. I added those and the Hummer search to a file Graham could access and hoped for the best. Fingerprint searches were not the easy magic seen on TV.

  The biggest, fattest detail in my notebook was Dr. Smythe of the Righteous and Proud. Why would he kill Max’s lawyer? I wanted it to be because Reggie knew Top Hat secrets, but what would Top Hat have to do with the R&P?

  The rich execs and power brokers in Top Hat didn’t know people like Bill’s mother existed.

  I reminded myself to keep an open mind. Smitty could have hated Reggie for personal reasons. A crooked lawyer who did drugs wouldn’t be high on the Most Liked list of righteous people.

  I needed to focus on Bill’s murder and not toplofty tales of political intrigue. One baby step at a time. I had to wait on others for the analysis of Llewellyn’s recording and a list of what was in Bill’s CD vault.

  So I decided to research local gangsters, starting with Toreador and DeLuca. If I couldn’t find websites, then I’d have to make a few personal visits.

  Patra’s perspective

  Patra finished up her article and video of Rhianna, posted it off to her boss, and began lining up her next story. An email flashed in her box from SAdams. She’d yet to meet her anonymous correspondent, but she opened it out of curiosity.

  A photo of her and Sean outside his newspaper office appeared on her screen. Rats. Broderick really did have spies everywhere, although she blamed this shot on Riley the termite.

  She tapped in a reply merely reading YEAH, AND? And sent it back. One did not survive high school without a meaningless retort.

  She was packing up at the end of the day when SAdams replied: WE MEET IN THE BAR DOWNSTAIRS.

  With a pick-up line like that, this was one seriously unsophisticated nerd, pretty much confirming her suspicions of IT geek. Who else would have access to his information?

  Just in case she was wrong, she took her time leaving her cubicle and primping in the restroom unt
il a crowd had time to gather in the bar. Using family tactics, she didn’t take the elevator all the way down. Instead, on the second floor, she found the stairs, and came out behind the crowded downstairs lobby where the elevator emptied. Unobserved, she located the staff entrance to the bar down a side hall and entered as if she owned the place.

  Kitchen staff glanced up, but no one stopped her. She could be new management for all they knew. That ploy won her a view to the bar from a doorway customers wouldn’t notice.

  Sure enough, there were the usual singletons hanging out around a semi-sophisticated glass bar wearing their conservative office suits and letting down their hair, pretending they were God’s gift to womankind, repeating uproarious stories of one-upmanship. If they’d been the only ones down here, she would have turned around and walked out.

  But there, at the end of the bar sipping a beer, was a bespectacled nerd in narrow tie, white shirt, and no suit jacket.

  She wanted the guy with the information, not the ones with ego. Ego and two bucks wouldn’t even score her a Starbucks. But there was no way of approaching the nerd without passing the herd of buffalo. Oh well.

  She flashed her red suit into the room, deliberately stalking past the watering hole without a glance. If stools swiveled, she didn’t notice. A shout of “Hey, New Girl,” went unheeded. Crass, that. With satisfaction, she took the empty chair on the far side of the nerd from the pack.

  “Sam?” she asked, signaling the bartender.

  The nerd spluttered in his beer. He turned his horn-rimmed spectacles in her direction and actually studied her face, not her cleavage. “How did you know?”

  “Process of elimination. Patra Llewellyn.” She stuck out her hand. “Are you really Sam Adams or is that your nom de plume?”

  He wiped his hand on a napkin and shook hers quickly, as if she might be too hot. “Samuel Adams. My mother was a history nut. Your father was my hero.”

  “Then I can count on one ally in the cubicle wars?” she asked as she ordered a pink martini.