Cyber Genius (5 page)

He sighed and managed to look conflicted. “This is to go no
further than this room, but the operating system breach is in their brand new,
unreleased beta software that’s only recently been given to designated
government and commercial organizations for testing.”

Graham called up programming code and scrolled through it,
highlighting lines of jargon. If he expected me to follow what he was doing, he
overrated my abilities. “The breach appears to be limited to the beta program.
It will take time to uncover the extent of damage. If that’s Tudor you’ve
stored downstairs, I could put him to work, too.”

I would let Tudor sleep a while before pounding his head
into a pillow and telling him he wasn’t responsible for crippling the internet—MacroWare
was. Or that was my assumption, anyway. MacroWare had far more power than my
baby brother, even though it was hard to imagine the State Department testing
beta software.

Instead of complaining about Graham’s spying on my guests, I
diverted the subject. “I’m a research assistant, nothing more. I have no idea
what that code says or what it does. What can I do about someone who apparently
breaches computer security and poisons CEOs? You need an army just to protect
the guys in the hospital.”

“The list of designated agencies testing the beta program is
not reliable. I’m copying you on my research into which websites and agencies have
been breached so far. We’ll need to drill down, find the related servers,
computers, and technicians. Maybe we’ll find a pattern.”

Yeah, and maybe someday I’d walk the moon.

I pried myself from the floor, trying to calculate how I could
untie this mighty knot of secrecy. He needed to know about Tudor’s monster and
that he’d been the one to warn Stiles, and Tudor needed to know about the beta
program and his hero’s murder, but the knowledge was too explosive to share
without permission. “Did it ever occur to you that you might need a team of
experts for jobs of this scope?”

“About as often as it occurs to you to cut your hair,” he
said, going back to flicking through a dozen screens at once. “Samson complex?”

My hair is black, but thicker and straighter than my Irish
father’s curls. I usually wear it in a long unfashionable braid down my back.

“If I cut it, then how would you recognize me?” I retorted.
Not giving him time to answer, I stalked back down the stairs to my office.

I’d never indulged in girlfriend games, but my reaction to
this relatively—emphasis on relative—intimate conversation came dangerously
close.

I was running the show now, I chanted as I dove into my
work. Graham needed
me
, instead of
the other way around.

Ana ponders

With my fear for Tudor’s fate, I was having a lot of
difficulty concentrating on the information Graham sent me on Stephen Stiles,
the founder and CEO of MacroWare.

Tudor had the potential to be another Stiles if properly
channeled.

Unfortunately, our family does not channel well. We’re too
independent-minded to play well with others, and profit is seldom our primary
motive.

I still wanted Tudor to have choices. I wanted him at MIT. I
didn’t want his future destroyed by accidental wormholes in faulty operating
systems.

My focus was shot. Besides fretting over Tudor, I had to
worry about Graham...
Crap
.

I should just bash my head against the desk. That would be
about as productive as worrying over Graham.

I ran searches on
tetrodotoxin
,
the puffer fish poison, learning how it worked. The bunny trails were
fascinating—powdered, the poison was said to create zombies in Haitian voodoo.
The tales had been discredited, but my imagination raced picturing Zombie MacroWare
execs attacking Wall Street.

EG ran down the basement stairs as soon as she arrived home
from school, interrupting my fantasies.

She dropped her books on a chair and practically bounced.
“What did Tudor say? Is he staying? Can I wake him now, please? I want him to
install that war game he told me about.”

Six short months ago, she’d been a cynical, pessimistic
nine-year-old version of me. Now that she’d finally found a school of similar
minds and had a home that didn’t involve trains, planes, and buses, she was
almost normal. Again—normal being relative. She’d at least lightened up on
making dangerously accurate predictions of doom.

Giving my siblings the normal life I never had was the
reason I put up with Graham and hoarded cash like a dragon sitting on gold.

“We’re meeting Nick for dinner,” I told her. “Let Tudor
sleep until it’s time to dress. And no, you’re not installing war games. Do
your homework now so you have all weekend to torment Tudor.”

I wasn’t in a hurry to wake the kid. I didn’t know how I’d break
the news that his hero was dead. Leave a newspaper at his door?

“He’s going to visit MIT, isn’t he?” EG crowed. “He said he
applied. Can we go with him to see the campus?”

Nice excuse for the kid’s presence here, should anyone learn
about it. I liked that. I wasn’t ready to tell her how much trouble he was in. “We’ll
see. He may not want us tagging along. And he got accepted by Stanford too.
That’s across the country and too expensive for all of us to visit.”

She pouted but grabbed her backpack and dashed upstairs.

Restlessly, I looked up the visa website Tudor had
mentioned, but I didn’t see any screaming news about massive cyber-attacks. Websites
crashed for all sorts of reasons, and no official would admit to the media that
their site had been hacked—especially if they traced it to a sixteen-year-old.

I sorted through Graham’s folder of notes from Stiles on offices
testing the beta software and chose an innocuous one. I followed his pathway
through the breach and unimaginatively drilled down through layers of computers
on a government financial committee working on banking laws. I yawned. Who
would spy on red tape like this?

Oh, yeah, right, crooked mortgage lenders and megabanks who
were being hauled over the coals might want to know what regulations committees
were pondering. Charming. But people into selling and trading didn’t know how
operating systems were made, they just expected their computers to work.

The committee’s website looked fine to me, and when I used
Graham’s information to access their files, they looked complete. Maybe the kid
had panicked over nothing.

Not likely unless he was doing drugs. Tudor had not
inherited any drama queen tendencies from our mother. Had I been the one to
wreck a government website, I’d be envisioning collapsing dominoes, one country
accusing another of cyber-war, and nuclear warheads. But that’s just my
experience talking.

My expertise is in detailed research. By the time I heard
excited chatter upstairs, I had the names of people who used the banking
committee’s website, locations of their computers, and utterly no idea what to
do with the information.

Living in a constant state of danger while growing up, I
overdosed on caution. Fearing police would carry Graham off while we were out
to dinner, I backed up all my drives on an external disk that fit into my
overlarge purse and sent a duplicate into our cloud server. As an extra
precaution, I unscrewed the cases and detached the hard drives. Those, I stored
above the trap door in the secret closet. That would puzzle anyone who dared
impound my precious Whiz.

Tudor had showered and changed while I was dismantling the
equipment. EG had evidently told him of our dinner plans. I waved at them in
the parlor on my way upstairs, and he glanced up at me warily before returning
to trouncing EG at video games—on a tablet computer.

Criminey,
Tudor had
access to the internet
. EG was only allowed to use the internet on my
computer, under my supervision, but she possessed the family genius for knowing
too much for her own good. She would know where to find our network password
and pass it on if asked.

If I knew my brother—and I did, we had similar stealthy
habits—he’d already been rummaging around online. I no longer had to wonder how
to tell Tudor about Stiles. How would a parent comfort their kid after such a
devastating blow?

I halted in the doorway. “You saw the news?”

Tudor glared. His eyes were suspiciously red. “It doesn’t
make sense,” he said.

Despite his lack of words, I knew what he meant. Why would
anyone murder a CEO? Once someone was elevated to that status, their productive
days were over, in my opinion. While alive, Stiles had been little more than a salesman
in these last years. He had minions to build code these days.

I couldn’t tell from Tudor’s reaction if he’d put two and
two together, but once his head cleared, he would.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Give me a minute to change, and we’ll
talk about it over dinner.”

For our family, that was a meaningful exchange. I knew Tudor
was upset about the death of his hero, but unlike some of us, he wouldn’t
display it by an emotional outburst. Tudor was a mean gamer with an adolescent
ability to make illogical connections with reality. My fear was that he’d go
rogue on the internet, and rip it apart in search of any real or imagined
villains if we didn’t give him some meaningful work to do.

Wondering how I could keep both Tudor’s and Graham’s secrets
without cutting out my tongue, I dressed in leggings, knee-high boots, and a
black sweater that hung almost as long as my black wool skirt. I’d learned the
wonders of consignment store shopping and had stocked up on warm. To keep Nick
from harping at me, I wore a boring black wool coat instead of my army jacket.

Tudor and EG griped when I made them dress warmly and head
down the basement stairs instead of using the front door.

“I know we have money now,” Tudor insisted belligerently. “A
taxi won’t break us.”

“That money is tied up in mutual funds. Besides, survival is
for the fittest. The restaurant is only half a mile away.” Ignoring his snit, I
tugged his scarf tighter.

I’d grown up living with both wealth and desperate
food-stealing poverty. I didn’t want my siblings to know hunger, but I didn’t
want them to turn into privileged snots with no ambition either.

“You want to be like the rest of the rich and weak?” I
asked. “Besides, if you go to MIT, you’ll need money. How much of a scholarship
can you expect? One that covers room and board?”

That shut him up. I’m betting he hadn’t told his father
about his grandiose expectations.

“How much school are you missing?” I asked on the way down
the stairs.

Tudor shrugged grumpily. “It’s our quarter break next week.
Everyone skips these last few days.”

“Yeah, right, and you have no finals?” But I knew he could
ace the tests once the teachers were persuaded this was a family emergency.
Solving his problem in time to get him back into class so he could keep his MIT
future was the real trick.

“Why this way?” EG asked suspiciously as we traipsed across
the backyard.

“Because officially, we have no idea where Tudor is,” I admitted
with a sigh. “Let’s not reveal his presence until we know what happens next.”

Tudor sent me a grateful glance and quit complaining about
the walk.

EG took the news that Tudor was hiding completely in stride,
checking out the back gate to be certain we weren’t watched, tugging Tudor’s
knit hat down so no trace of his copper hair could be seen.

Sneakiness is apparently genetic.

The restaurant Nick had chosen was dimly lit, crowded, and
noisy. With Tudor and EG to consider, he’d gone for an all-American
beef-and-potatoes kind of place, except it was well known for its fabulous
soups and salads. Nick and I had been spoiled by Mallard’s gourmet meals.

I insisted on a booth in a dark corner behind a large post.
The hostess looked us over, decided we weren’t important enough to put on
display, and hid us as requested, much to Nick’s disappointment.

As usual, our glamorous brother was decked out in an
elegantly tailored suit with just the right suave open collar and loosened tie
to set off his carefully styled golden hair. Nick was the fashionista Magda
should have had for a daughter.

“What’s wrong now?” Nick demanded as soon as a server took
our drink orders.

I glared at Tudor. “We work together. Tell Nick.”

“And EG?” he asked warily.

“EG, either plug your ears or learn to keep quiet,” I told
her.

She stuck her tongue out at me. Since we both knew she would
sneak until she found out what was going on, I didn’t argue with that.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and forced myself to admit
my dilemma. “I hate to tell you this, folks, but I think this one has to go to
Graham, too, if he doesn’t already know. I’m not sure how long we can sit on
Tudor’s little difficulty.”

The kid slid down in his chair. “I’m going to jail.”

“You create illegal software. You hack websites,” Nick
pointed out. “Sooner or later, jail’s a given.”

“Not if Graham gets involved,” I asserted. With luck, if I
could persuade Tudor to give up his secret, I could trade it for revealing
Graham’s. I was still angry about our landlord knowing where Max’s money was
all these months, so I wasn’t giving away anything for free.

The missing millions were
not
a topic for tonight or nothing would get done. I wanted more
certainty that the money existed before mentioning it to my family.

Tudor looked wary about my suggestion but didn’t throw a
tantrum. He gave a general explanation of what he’d done, then concluded, “If
Stiles died before a patch was ordered, my worm could be anywhere, doing
anything. My e-mail could be sitting in a dead person’s box. For all I know,
I’ve unleashed a
real
monster.”

“Or it could have died on impact. I’ve spent the day looking
and have seen no evidence of serious destruction from your worm,” I told him. “If
MacroWare has a security breach, it’s a bigger potential problem than your baby
cookie monster. China and Russia could be sucking data out of classified
databases right now. We could have a world war on our hands, international
bankruptcy, economic chaos.”