Always You (23 page)

“Well, let me explain the reality of parking,” Kyla said. “That Cayman costs about fifty grand. Do you want to pay for denting it with this big ol’ barge of yours?”

“How do you know how much that car costs?” Clara asked.

“Zweli took a spin in one a while back, when we were in California doing post production on my film.”

“When will it finally be finished?” Danielle asked, bouncing in excitement.

“It’s scheduled for release next fall,” Kyla said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Me, too!” Danielle clapped her hands under her chin. “All my friends are going to be so jealous when they see me on
E!
at a real Hollywood premiere!”

“What’s the title of the movie again, Ky?” Clara asked.

“
Catching the Moon
,” she said.

“I like that,” Chiara said, lurching forward as Cady finally brought the car to a stop. “There’s a romance to it. It’s inspiring.”

“That’s the whole point.” Kyla, looking like a movie star in a red, fitted wool coat and big pair of chic Chanel sunglasses, opened her door, pulled her seat forward and helped Ella and Abigail out of the rearmost seat.

Everyone else spilled from the car, and Cady spent a moment admiring her parking job.

“Hold my hand to cross the street, Ella?” Chiara offered.

“Soul Hipp-pip-pippi!” the little girl responded as she slipped her hand into Chiara’s.

* * *

Chiara and her sisters browsed through the racks of clothing artfully scattered throughout the small boutique while Danielle, Abigail and Ella amused themselves by trying on accessories handed to them by a very patient sales clerk.

“This has me all over it,” Kyla sighed lustily as she held up a two-piece summer ensemble with a criss-cross halter top and long, flowing skirt in a brilliant green, orange and yellow print. “Can’t you see me wearing this to the beach with Zweli and the baby? Once I lose the last fifteen pounds of my baby weight, of course.”

Chiara grunted her approval, although the outfit Kyla was admiring was a radical departure from her current Jackie Onassis costume.

“I’m getting this,” Cady said, showing them a free flowing, floor-length dress in muted shades of teal, green and ocean blue. “It’ll grow with me until the baby’s born, and I can still wear it afterward as a wrap or a cover up.”

“What will you need to cover up?” Ciel asked as she sorted through a rack of snazzy patchwork skirts. “You bounce right back to a size five after each of your pregnancies.”

Abigail scurried over to Ciel carrying a white dress on a hanger. “Can I have this, Mama, please, please, please?”

Chiara looked at the garment and fell in love with the simple straight sleeveless dress. It would have looked like any other spring dress but for the single braid of fabric along the back, which gave it both originality and sweetness perfect for a girl Abigail’s age. Chiara tried to picture her niece in the dress, running around Abby’s back yard at the Fourth of July barbeque, her hair, as thick and dark as molasses, gleaming as it streamed behind her in a silken banner.

The only image that came to her mind, though, was that of a little girl of her own dashing about with her cousins in the darling summer dress.

She shook the picture out of her head. “Let me buy that for her, Ciel,” Chiara said. “I really want to.”

“Sure,” Ciel agreed.

“Thank you, Aunt Chiara,” Abigail said, crushing Chiara’s legs in a hug.

Ella appeared with an embroidered black Kofi hat sized perfectly for her head. “Soul Hippi?”

“Soul Hippi,” Chiara said, taking the hat from Ella and adding it to her “to buy” pile.

“This is you, Chi.” Cady stepped up to her and held a long white dress up to her shoulders.

Chiara fell instantly in love and took the garment to one of the tri-fold mirrors staged near the fitting rooms. The crisp white halter dress was made of silk jersey that moved like air. The alluring, low-cut bodice complemented the plunging back. Chiara knew just by looking at it that the floor-length skirt would be just right for for her petite frame. The dress was so simple in its silhouette and execution, but so well made that it rivaled many of the garments she’d purchased from well-known designers overseas. Just as she’d been able to envision her own little girl someday prancing about in a Soul Hippi sundress, she easily pictured John’s face looking upon her in this white dress as they stood together, hand in hand, before their families and God on a beach someplace far away.

“Would you like to try that on?” the smiling sales clerk asked.

“I don’t need to,” Chiara replied. “I’m taking it.”

“Special occasion?” the salesgirl asked, her smile widening.

Chiara shyly suppressed a grin. Without realizing it, she had just chosen the dress for the wedding that, up until that moment, she hadn’t wanted to have. “Yes,” she told the salesgirl. “It’s for a very special occasion.”

“Let me take those things up to the counter for you,” the woman offered.

Chiara thanked her and piled Abigail’s dress, Ella’s hat, two other skirts and two tops she’d selected into the woman’s arms. She was adding her white dress to the pile when her cell phone began to ring.

Certain that it was John, she quickly began rooting through her handbag for her phone. It stopped ringing before she found it, but the moment she fixed her eyes on the Caller ID window and saw George’s phone number, another cell phone rang. Nearby, Cady dug her phone from her pocket. She didn’t answer it, but merely read the message in her text box.

“Uh, we have to go,” Cady announced. “I have someplace to be.”

“Me, too,” Chiara said as she made her way to the cashier’s stand.

No one heard Clara’s cell phone ring, but she was reading the message box as she joined her sisters at the checkout. “I’ve gotta run, too,” Clara said.

“What are the odds of all three of you being called to the Bat Cave at the same time?” Kyla asked.

Chiara, Cady and Clara all looked at her suspiciously.

“What?” Kyla asked, totally ignorant of the impact her words had on her sisters. She set her purchases on the counter and waited her turn to check out. “I just think it’s weird that you all get called at the same time. Unless it’s Mama, and then I have to wonder why she didn’t call me and Ciel, too.”

And then, as if on cue, Ciel’s phone rang. She looked at her Caller ID, and then glanced at Cady and Chiara, uttering one word. “George?”

Chiara nodded. Her stomach dropped to her knees when Cady and Clara nodded, too.

“You have five seconds to explain this before I knock you out,” John told George once he was able to speak.

George had called his cell phone, and John had rushed to the dorm to find Chiara and her sisters crammed into his brother’s messy little single. At first, he’d thought that Chiara had told her sisters everything. But when he’d entered the room to see George cowering behind Clara, he’d known immediately whose lips had gone loose.

“It’s all
her
fault.” George pointed an accusing finger at Cady. “She made me tell her what was going on.”

Hands low on the hips of his jeans, John slowly shook his head. “How the hell did Cady make you do anything?”

“She came over here and practically kicked down my door,” George said in a nervous, high-pitched voice. “After she visited you guys in Chicago. She made me tell her everything.”

John continued to scowl.

“She said she was going to tell the registrar that I’ve been changing my grades!”

Clara turned and looked at George. “You change your grades?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly.

“All the best geeks tamper with their grades,” Cady said. “It was a guess that paid off.”

John stood before Cady. “Chiara asked you,” he started. “No. She
begged
you not to get involved in this.”

“That was awfully hard for me to do after I saw her face smashed,” Cady said. “What’s done is done. I got involved, and before you light into George again, you should know that I’m the one who recruited Clara and Ciel to help.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” Kyla whined petulantly. “I could have helped, too. What are we talking about anyway?”

“May as well tell her.” John threw up his hands. “The rest of the world knows.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Cady snapped impatiently. “But it will soon, if everything works out the way we’ve planned.”

Chiara shook in confusion and annoyance. “I still don’t get this. Who’s ‘we?’ What plan? John and I have been proceeding with the utmost caution. After what happened to Zhou, we didn’t want to involve any more people in this than we had to. The only reason we brought George in is because he’s freakishly savvy with computers, and we needed someone who could dissect a microchip. Even after I was attacked, I didn’t want to move back home because I didn’t want to put any of you in the line of fire.” Tears shining in her eyes, she turned on Cady. “And now you’ve gone and dragged the whole damn family into my mess!”

Cady stepped over George’s plaid comforter, which lay half on and half off his bed, to get to Chiara. She cupped her sister’s face and struck two tears away with her thumbs. “Your mess is our mess. There’s no way I was going to let anyone get away with hurting you. If you hadn’t mentioned George, I never would have gotten to the root of the problem. I knew I wouldn’t get a thing out of you or John. But George sang like a canary with the right incentive.”

“Incentive?” George burst out. “You put me in a headlock and started pulling out my nose hairs!”

“She’s always been a dirty fighter,” Kyla said.

“Yeah, well,” George sulked. “She’s lucky she’s pregnant, or I would’ve given her such a roughneck-style thump.”

“Oh really?” Clara said.

George humbly dropped his head. “No, ma’am.”

“So why’d you call us here, George?” John asked.

“He didn’t call me.” Offended, Kyla crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not a member of the secret club.”

“You have a tiny baby to worry with,” Cady said. “I figured you had enough on your plate.”

“Well, could you at least tell me what’s going on?”

Chiara sat Kyla down on an overturned milk carton George used as a laundry hamper and filled her in on everything that had happened from the time she’d spoken with a drunken Zhou in the Seiyo lounge in Tokyo to the moment George had summoned them all by cell phone at Soul Hippi. From there, she required a few answers herself, and she looked to George to provide them.

George found the courage to step away from Clara, but he didn’t stray far, not with John staring at him with menace in his eyes. “Cady started looking into Emmitt Grayson and USITI’s sales reports to see what companies had purchased R-GS systems in the past five years,” George said. “When we came across the
American Investors
article detailing Grayson’s amazing success at playing the stock market, we had to get Ciel involved. She got Lee to provide us with information about Grayson’s investment portfolio.”

“Great,” Chiara said dismally. “Now Lee’s breaking privacy laws.”

“No, everything he gave us was publicly accessible,” Cady said. “George and I did the less-than-legal part.”

“I did a little creative hacking, and we found out that Grayson’s biggest investment successes came from buying and selling the stock of companies he’d previously sold R-GS systems to,” George said. “Once we had the skinny on Grayson’s finances, I started working on a way to combat the master chip.”

“That’s where Clara came in,” Cady said. “She has access to secure computer systems that enabled George to work on the chip without triggering any of USITI’s built-in self-destructs or security measures.”

“Clara helped me fine-tune my rebound chip, too,” George said. “We’re a really good team.”

“Geeks of a feather,” Clara sang airily.

“Does the rebound chip work?” John asked, perking in excitement.

“Don’t know,” George said. “We need to install it in a system that uses R-GS chips.”

“I can try it at work,” John offered.

“It can’t be an internal USITI system,” George told him. “The rebound chip will let the computer user know when there’s an interloper, but it’s specific to the USITI master. So any USITI system would be immune to the rebound effect.”

“The rebound chip can’t tell on itself,” Clara explained simply.

“I am so totally confused,” Kyla said. “I hate computers, and this is why.”

“The rebound chip uses the same programming and pathways as the master, only in reverse,” Clara explained. “It’s really quite brilliant.”

George blushed furiously under Clara’s praise.

“The master chip opens a backdoor to Grayson, at USITI. The rebound trip is designed to send an intruder alert to the violated computer, not USITI. If you were to install a rebound at USITI, you’d get a message saying that a USITI user is on your computer. It cancels itself out, since obviously a USITI user would be using a USITI computer.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Kyla sighed, giving up any effort to figure out the master-rebound chip conundrum.

“What about Carlton Puel?” John asked. “Did you get anything on him?”

George hurried to his desk and rifled through several untidy stacks of papers. “I accessed his personal e-mail this morning and found six e-mails from Emmitt Grayson delivered on January 4.”

“The day Grayson came to see me at home,” Chiara said.

Holding several sheets of paper, George began to read. “ ‘If you touch her again, I’ll see to it that you pay personally.’ Grayson sent that to Puel. Here’s Puel’s response: ‘All I want is my fair share.’ Then Grayson replies, ‘Until my personal property finds its way home, our agreement remains as it stands.’ ”

“George helped me do some digging on InfoSysTech, the database newspapers use to collect information on people,” Cady said. “It might not mean anything, but Emmitt Grayson and Carlton Puel were college roommates. They’ve known each other for quite a long time. Maybe Grayson confided in him about how the R-GS and master chips function.”

“What about Puel’s finances?” John asked. “Is he doing as well as Grayson?”

“Not by a long shot,” George said. “He pulled $505,000 in net income last year with two million in bonuses compared to Grayson’s $1.85 million net take with over eight million in bonuses.”

“No wonder he wants a master chip,” Chiara said. “He provides the chips for Grayson to program, yet he rakes in less than half of what Grayson makes using the chips.”

“Puel is obviously convinced that the chip is in your possession, guys,” Cady said to Chiara and John. “He’s the one who sent Anthony Taylor.”

Chiara’s forehead wrinkled. “Who?”

“John Doe. The man who attacked you in Chicago and jumped John in the parking garage.”

Chiara was amazed. “How did you get his real name?”

“I went back to the police station the day after you were released,” Cady said. “The cops ran John Doe’s prints but he wasn’t in the system, and he still refused to give them his name. I asked the precinct captain if I could have a word with him, and I convinced John Doe to give me his name.”

“Did you put him in a headlock?” George asked.

“Didn’t have to.” Cady’s lips pulled into an enigmatic smile. “I gave him a candy bar.”

“You scared him with a Snickers?” John asked skeptically.

“I put his discarded wrapper in an evidence bag and told him that I’d give it to the police,” Cady said. “A candy wrapper with his prints on it could be placed at the scene of any unsolved crime between here and Chicago, and since he’d been arrested, his prints are in the system now.”

“God, Cady, you threatened him with blackmail?” Ciel asked, aghast.

“It was only a threat. I threw the wrapper away once he gave me his name.”

“We searched Anthony Taylor on InfoSysTech,” George said. “He’s a resident of Phoenix. When I cross-referenced him with Carlton Puel and Vulcan Semiconductor, I got a hit on the Vulcan combination. Puel used his in-house travel department to book Taylor’s flights from Arizona to Chicago and St. Louis. I also found travel records for Puel that put him in Malaysia and Tokyo at the same time Chiara and Chen Zhou were there.”

“We’re close to nailing both of them, Chiara,” Cady said. “It’s almost over.”

Chiara’s knees weakened. She took a few deep breaths and her hands restlessly fidgeted with the cuffs of her sleeves. Her jaw tensed as she approached Cady. “My whole life, I’ve had the four of you bossing me around and always trying to do what you think is best for me.” Her voice shook, and it was difficult for her to force words past the thick lump plugging her windpipe. “I begged you to stay out of this, Cady, but as usual, you went ahead and just did what you wanted without giving a single thought to what repercussions your actions would have on me. Or John, or George…” She stood face to face with Cady for a moment, but then she suddenly threw her arms around her big sister. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for not listening to me.”

John maneuvered around more of George’s land mines of clutter and filth to gently rub Chiara’s shoulders. “So what’s next?” he asked, directing the question to his fresh allies.

“We have to test the rebound chip,” Clara said.

Chiara pulled away from Cady, but continued to hold her hand. “How do we do that?”

“You have to make one more sale for USITI,” George said.

* * *

Three hundred miles stood between Chiara and Emmitt Grayson, yet she still felt the familiar chill of his unblinking eyes on her as she spoke to him by means of a conference line in John’s office at USITI-St. Louis.

Sundays were full-fledged workdays at the St. Louis office, with the information systems department handling technical and operating questions from computer users all over the world as part of USITI’s 24-hour/7 days a week customer service policies. USITI employees, John’s employees, sat in well-ordered, spacious cubicles speaking pleasantly into headset telephones on the other side of John’s office door, while inside the office, Chiara grated her sweaty palms along the knees of her jeans.

She’d hoped to get away with leaving a message for Grayson, one to which he could later respond with a simple yes or no. But as was his habit, Grayson was in his office on Sunday, surfing the Internet. In retrospect, Chiara had come to believe that Grayson’s Sunday surfing shifts were devoted to accessing the waves of confidential and lucrative information made available to him by the master chips.

Whatever he was doing, Chiara had hoped to be received by his voicemail, not Grayson himself, when she called his office line at nine
a.m.
Sunday morning.

“I’ve been reading the dossier you sent to me right before I left for St. Louis,” Chiara started abruptly. “Westcott Technologies sounds really exciting. I was…uh…well, I was curious as to whether you’d assigned another team to pursue an R-GS sale to Westcott. If not, I’d like to take a run at it.”

Grayson was so silent for so long, Chiara thought the call might have been disconnected.

“May I ask why?” he said eventually, “given that your resignation from USITI is effective as of tomorrow?”

Chiara slumped in relief. She had him now, and she knew it. Her stomach still turned tiny somersaults, but her voice gained strength. “I’ve been living with my mother here in St. Louis, and…well…it’s not quite as exciting as flying off to Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur.”

“I can’t imagine that Baltimore is any more exciting,” Grayson said.

“If you’d rather I not accept the assignment, then by all means, I’ll return the dossier and—”

“Please don’t misunderstand me, Chiara,” Grayson hastily cut in. “I’d be extremely grateful if you were to visit Westcott Technologies. I’ve been trying to acquire that account for some time now, and quite frankly, I can’t think of a better person for the sale than you.”

“I appreciate your faith in me, Mr. Grayson,” Chiara said. And then she went for the money question, that one that would help decide the success or failure of her plan. “How long will it take you to select a partner for me?”

Leaving Chiara sitting stiffly and holding her breath, Grayson thought about it. “I’m confident that you can handle Westcott on your own. It’s a small, family-operated organization. A single sales representative of your caliber and qualifications will be far more effective than a team. I believe the more personal we make our pitch, the greater the likelihood of success.”

Chiara released a long, silent sigh of relief. “Thank you for that vote of confidence, Mr. Grayson.”
Even though it’s totally misplaced,
she thought.

“How soon would you like to go to Baltimore?” Grayson asked. “I’d like to put the wheels in motion as soon as possible.”