Which told me right there that she suspected they were involved in his death. But I kept my mouth shut and let her continue.
“I do remember Riley as a creepy little man who ran errands for Archie’s sycophants in Iraq,” she said. I could almost see her frown. “I think he used to provide drugs and alcohol to most of the press corps, so he was probably spying. Wasn’t he in prison at one time?”
I hid my glee that she’d revealed more than she knew. Riley had been overseas! Iraq . . . not precisely where Patrick was killed but relatively speaking, not too far away. “Yes, Riley went to jail about a decade ago for tapping the VP’s phone. Typical Broderick stunt,” I said casually. “Apparently Archie couldn’t hire him directly once he had a prison record, but hired Leonard as a private contractor.”
“Oh, yes, that’s right. Has that phone tapping incident been ten years already? Graham caught the tap and turned the glare on Broderick instead of the war. That was back when Graham was still speaking to the world. How’s he doing these days? Giving you any trouble?”
“He does his thing, I do mine. Riley’s been following Patra,” I said, diverting her back to the topic at hand. “I assume if he was running errands for the press corps, he probably had contact with Smedbetter as well,” I said casually. “All the English speakers hang together.”
“Well, you can’t expect us to live in areas likely to be bombed, can you?” she asked tartly. “But Patrick was killed in Lebanon, Smedbetter was in Iraq, Whitehead was with the Brit embassy and not the military, and I wasn’t in either place, so I can’t tell you anything.”
But willingly or not, she had told me Broderick’s flunkies had been in the same part of the world as Patrick.
“Well, if you can think of any way of making Riley back off, I’d be appreciative. Graham isn’t happy with lurkers,” I said.
“Oh, just light a firecracker up his posterior, dear. You know how it’s done. How’s my baby doing in school?”
We’d had a fight over EG not too long ago, but apparently Magda had given up in favor of letting EG know her dad. We had a brief discussion on EG’s fascination with bats, and then she got another call and had to cut off.
I know Magda loves us, but she was never the kind of mother who hovered and took care of boo-boos. She’d always left that to me and whatever nannies or ayahs she hired. I’d spent half my childhood resenting her and the other half imitating her. Strong personalities like hers had that kind of influence — which was why I was determined to give EG a different experience. Except that nature/nurture thing was pretty impossible to separate.
But at least we were talking to each other again, sort of. I needed to ask Magda about our African siblings sometime, but with the yacht insurance and lawsuits still up in the air, it didn’t need to be immediately.
Someone had tried to kill my sister today. That took priority.
Anyone could have bugged Patra’s phone. I had no way of knowing who had heard Magda’s message about Rose’s atrocity, but I was pretty certain that had been the lighted fuse. Orders had come down to cull her from the herd. Was Smedbetter in a position to give orders?
But a white Cadillac had followed Sean and Patra after they’d picked up Bill’s boxes and a black Escalade of thugs had come gunning for them. And Patra had said the armed goon had wanted her, specifically, not just the boxes. To see what she knew about her father’s papers? To see who else knew about Rose and the cover up?
And now they didn’t care what she knew, they just wanted her gone?
My gut instinct was to put all the bad guys in one room and let them tear each other to shreds, but I didn’t have that kind of power. I only had sneakiness on my side.
I emailed the speech analyst to ask if they’d identified any of the voices from the various files we’d sent them.
I emailed Sean to ask if any of Bill’s audio files matched interviews with Smedbetter, Whitehead, or Leonard Riley. I wanted to add Sir Archibald Broderick, but Archie wouldn’t leave his signature, or his voice, anywhere that would muddy his image. Tape #1143 was a rarity.
Tired, stymied, and overwrought after the day’s excess of terror, I puttered around while waiting for replies. I was wound too tightly to sleep. The house above me was growing quiet as the inhabitants settled down for the evening. I usually returned to my room and worked on my laptop at this hour, but knowing someone could be staring into my window from the house across the street sort of ruined my relaxation technique.
So I amused myself by scanning one of Crap Media’s scandal sheets for the past few months, under the assumption that easy reading ought to bore me into slumber.
The entertainment news nearly pushed me over the edge within minutes. Having grown up without American movies or television, I’d never developed the habit of watching them. So the busty bimbos and chesty gigolos pasted all over the front pages were meaningless names and faces to me. Tapping their phones and following their cars ought to bore any decent journalist into hara-kiri. Overdramatizing the speculation derived from said tapping and stalking was the work of a soap opera screenwriter.
But after a few minutes, my lizard brain clicked in, and I got focused. When I looked at Archie’s scandal sheets all at once like this, a pattern formed. Chesty Gigolo attended a conservative rally and sang the national anthem to a roaring crowd and applause. Fine. Chesty wins some film award. Chesty goes to London. Chesty can’t do wrong.
Busty, however, has a head on her shoulders. She sings at the liberal president’s holiday dinner and makes speeches for a women’s rights group. Suddenly, Busty’s alcoholic mother hits the newsstands with stories of how her daughter broke her heart. Busty rallies the crowds to support gun control. Busty’s teenage arrest for drunk driving hits the front page.
The pattern followed through all of the various Busties and Chesties on the front pages of the gossip sheets. I didn’t know who gave a crap that the liberal entertainers got smeared with bad news and the conservative flag-wavers came out smelling like — pardon the expression — Roses, but if it sold papers, someone must.
So, in the midnight hours, I papered most of Hollywood with discreet inquiries and copied Patra on all of them. Let her really work entertainment news.
Patra’s perspective
People swiveled to stare as Patra strolled through BM’s offices on Wednesday morning. She’d dressed for stares. She’d dressed to demand respect. Wearing an Armani jacket and skirt with her Gucci heels, she strode through the cubicles with her head held high and her best smile on. She liked making them stare. She hoped it threatened the hell out of the monsters behind that spy mirror.
She carried weapons they’d never understand in her imitation Gucci shoulder bag. She intended to leave a strong impression before she left. She’d make them think twice about coming after her later.
She wasn’t happy that she hadn’t uncovered the evidence she needed to pin Broderick to her father’s death, but she would never have a chance to expose him if she was dead. So her parting message had to be memorable.
No one said a word as she took the chair at her desk, not even the office manager who had to allow her to log into the system. So, she wasn’t fired yet. She had no idea which desks her team mates had occupied, so she didn’t know if the empty cubicles had been theirs.
She went online to check her personal email before she went to work subverting the system with Sam’s aid. She nearly laughed aloud at the flurry of irate messages from her Hollywood contacts asking if she knew about Broderick’s propaganda campaign.
What the hell had set them off? She read deeper and found Ana’s message at the bottom of several — asking if they’d noted that left-leaning actors got smeared and right-leaning got promoted in the gossip rags. The examples the messages fed her provided enough material to write a book.
And one tiny clue amid the rants: Beware the Righteous and Proud interviewers. They tape everything and manipulate your words to suit their purposes in their propaganda sheets. I thought I
was talking to good Christians and ended up being toasted in hell.
R&P had interviewers?
She didn’t have much time but she did a quick Google search. The organization had its own newsletter with a huge audience. The interviews they printed came from their role models — including Hollywood names. The R&P had the power to build a strong fan base.
Broderick’s television stations and newspapers acted as a mouthpiece for the R&P. Media fed off each other. Any interesting interviews would be picked up by conservative pundits and Poo Manor.
R&P’s journalists would most likely have taped their interviews and seemed the likely source of the audio files invoiced to Dr. Smythe. She didn’t have time to dig deeper.
She IM’d Sam Adams: Ready?
You’re sure your guy will hire me after this? he IM’d back.
Yep. She’d already had a talk with Sean. He’d agreed that anyone as enterprising as Sam Adams would be an asset to a real newspaper office. If nothing else, Sam could get their new computers up and running.
Send it on then. I’m taking out some insurance.
Whistling under her breath, Patra called up her personal online document folder and copied the first installment of the exposé she’d written. The article revealed times, dates, and events connected to BM’s media propaganda and practices prior to the Iraqi revolution, taken from her father’s files. She pasted the article into her BM word processing program and sent it directly to Sam.
The system required that he vet any articles passed for publication and forward questionable ones to his manager, but that wasn’t happening today.
This method of bypassing the system wouldn’t have worked for long if she and Sam intended to keep their jobs, but they didn’t. So once was enough.
A few minutes later, while she pretended to work on her next Hollywood story, her office phone rang. She tapped one of her earbuds. All she got was one long, appreciative whistle. She grinned.
“Same to you, buddy,” she replied, cutting off.
She closed up her computer and moseyed upstairs to have a word with a few of her least favorite execs. All she needed was a few curse words shouted into her recorder as she tendered her resignation.
Twenty-seven
After walking EG to the Metro, I returned to my cave and began setting wheels in motion. I didn’t care about Graham’s research or any of my other cases today. I had one goal and one goal only in mind — bring down the menace who had attempted to kill my sister.
I worked through the papers Patra had rescued from Bill’s files. Tapes #2844 and #3926 had the names of Smedbetter and Smythe on the file label. None mentioned Broderick or Riley. I emailed Sean a request for copies of those audio files.
Sean was apparently working along similar lines. He emailed the audio files back to me within the hour. I passed them on to the speech analyst in Seattle. With Magda’s verification that Smedbetter, Bloom, and Riley were all in the wrong place at the same time, I couldn’t dismiss coincidence.
I wasn’t entirely certain how Whitehead, a Brit and an embassy employee, figured into any of this, but he’d been in Kirkuk and again in the Mideast five years ago. There had been a Brit accent on Patra’s tape. I emailed Nick asking if there were any Whiteheads on the embassy staff here in D.C. — because his offer of a job seemed a mite too Machiavellian.
Dr. Smythe worried me, too. He didn’t work for BM directly. He hadn’t been in any war zones that I could determine. He was the connection to Riley, not any of the warriors. He’d killed our lawyer, which had nothing to do with anything as far as I could see. It had been some of his R&P people who had helped hunt Patra down, but he’d been busy being arrested during the zombie race.
I was hesitant about taking my next step. It would be tricky, and it would involve Graham. I didn’t want to play all my cards at once unless I had a good chance of results. I liked as much information as possible before I blew up my world.
Patra sent me a cackling e-card of triumphant witches. I took that to mean she’d appreciated my Hollywood amusement, and that she was still alive. No one at BM had shot her down in cold blood. Yet. I got cold chills thinking about her working that nest of snakes.
It was too early in Seattle to expect the speech analyst to get back to me. I wanted loose ends tied up, and I didn’t like waiting. I tapped my fingers on my desk, considered all the parameters, then, in an act of desperation, I emailed Graham with my query. I politely didn’t disturb his privacy with the intercom the way he disturbed mine.
No was his instant reply.
I’d expected that, but I was still furious. It wasn’t as if I asked things of him unless I was utterly desperate. Flat out refusal was just rude.
I’d already debated my alternatives if politeness didn’t work. The one I liked best involved power tools. I slipped across the street, liberated a couple of battery-operated macho man toys, and dropped them into my canvas sack while the workmen were taking a smoke break. I was back in my cellar before anyone noticed.
I may have mentioned a time or two that I excelled in hiding while growing up. My introverted self craved privacy and my curiosity demanded answers, so I learned how to locate secret doors and hide from the best spies in town. I’d not had the time or incentive to hunt for my grandfather’s secret passages, but I’d threatened to do so enough that Graham really should have been warned.
He’d been in my locked cellar office. That ticked me off enough to justify my next step. I’d chosen the cellar for my office because it’s pretty hard to put secret doors in solid concrete walls. A normal person might assume he’d picked my door lock or obtained a key, except I’m not normal. I always left tape or a hair or other marker to know when my door had been opened. Even though CDs had been removed from my desk, the markers had never been disturbed.
Graham being Graham, he may have just found some sneaky way to put the markers back, but my privacy had been disturbed in too many ways on other floors. Knowing my mother and grandfather, I was pretty damned certain there were hidden passages.
I eased down the cellar stairs with my tool trophies and checked Mallard’s kitchen and premises. He was gone, as I’d also expected. Graham’s curiosity about my note would not be assuaged until he’d sent Mallard to do what I’d requested. He simply didn’t intend to tell me about it, the secretive bastard.
Humming to myself, I tapped along my roof. No one had bothered adding acoustic tile or plaster board for a real ceiling. All I had over my head were the century-old boards and supports for the floors. When I found a section that sounded different from the rest, I flashed my light over it. Sure enough, there were the nearly invisible cuts giving evidence of chicanery. A trap door would allow anyone reasonably athletic to simply drop into my abode. Climbing out would be a bear for a short person, unless they came prepared with a rope ladder.
Someone tall and muscular could lift themselves up. I drooled just picturing Graham performing that feat.
Spiderwebs coated most of the dark corners since I didn’t allow Mallard in here to clean. I’d set off a bug bomb before moving in, so I wasn’t too worried about actual creepy crawlies. The area in question, however, was remarkably clear of dusty webs. Really, the deceptive bastard deserved anything I threw at him.
Just the idea of Graham lowering himself into my cave like GI Joe on a mission riled my temper. That man had to learn to play fair, or at least behave like a normal human being and ask permission. No more stealing CDs off my desk that weren’t his.
Humming the Halloween tune EG was currently using as her security alarm, I ran up to her tower. She usually left her door unlocked when she wasn’t there, in brave hope that Mallard might actually change her linens at least. Her room seemed relatively neat, so I assumed she’d rid the place of bats and Mallard had generously cleaned up. He really deserved more than we could pay him.
I dismantled her mp3 player with the Halloween theme song, unburied a few of her electronic toys, and returned to the cellar. I checked my com
puter but Seattle hadn’t come through yet. I really wanted those voices identified before wreaking external havoc. As long as Patra was safe, I’d stick to internal chaos for now.
Standing on a chair, I ran a power drill into the boards over my head and created a hole large enough for the power saw. I used the saw to open a hole large enough to use as a handle. I yanked down at the old planks, but they wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t see hinges. I had to assume the door lifted up, not down — a nuisance which made my job harder but not impossible.
I turned on the mp3 and slid it through the hole, then wound up one of EG’s toy bats and shoved it through. The stupid thing flew into a wall immediately but kept flapping around, banging into things — like more walls in the hidden passage.
I returned to the first floor and headed for what once probably had been a family parlor. In my grandfather’s last bedridden years, it had been turned into a bedroom. It came equipped with a marvelous modern bathroom with a Jacuzzi and was now an unused guest room.
Sure enough, between the new closet and the new bathroom, I heard the sounds of spooky music and a banging bat. I opened the closet, flashed my light around, and found the seam for a door in one wall. Right about now, the weird noises in the closet ought to be drifting up through the passage and irritating the hell out of Graham. The image cheered me considerably.
With a little exploration, I found the pressure spring to open the hidden closet entrance. This was a new device, probably installed at my grandfather’s request in the last decade.
Whistling along with the creepy music, I opened the entrance to the hidden passageway behind the closet wall. A handle carved into the wood floor revealed the escape hatch to my office. Metal circular stairs led upward.
Collecting my toys, including the flying bat, I started climbing. I located the door on the bedroom landing and opened it — one of the unused bedrooms. Graham had better be very glad it didn’t go through my study. It was bad enough that this relentlessly masculine bedroom was next to the study and may have once been my grandfather’s.
Undercover Genius Page 21