Cyber Genius (8 page)

Uzbekistan
? Tudor
gulped and nodded. “Yes, sir. I don’t think my tablet will do the job, though.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think I can let you out of my sight
with anything more dangerous than a tablet. If you want a full computer, you’ll
have to use that one over there.” Graham tilted his head toward a corner of his
workspace.

Tudor widened his eyes. “Here, sir? I’ll be working here?”

“Safer than a jail cell, anyway.” With that, Graham returned
to work.

***

Ana ponders the impossible

My mailbox boiled over with Patra’s curses and pleas for
information on whether Graham knew Stiles or anything about the murders. I
figured if I left the mansion, Sean would pop out from behind light posts. Our
nosy reporter wouldn’t dare actually knock on the
door
. He had issues with Graham that I didn’t totally grasp.

Since Graham’s preference was complete silence, he wouldn’t
deign to speak to anyone, much less journalists. I had to be his portal and
choose what information to give out, and when. Right now, all Patra and Sean
were doing was grasping straws based on the CNN video, old photos of Graham,
and insider knowledge of Graham’s obsessions that no other reporters possessed.

Our bargain was that I fed them what I thought they could
use without mayhem and destruction, and they helped me dig into files I didn’t
have the time or expertise to comb through. Right now, they didn’t have
anything I wanted.

While Graham interrogated Tudor, I dug through the files
that had come in overnight. Graham either had a spy or spyware inside police
headquarters, because all the police files were here along with media reports,
hospital reports, and anything else Graham thought relevant.

If I was having difficulty keeping up with my last remaining
on-line clients, Graham must be having a devil of a time, given the ton of
information in this folder. He couldn’t have slept at all.

Sifting through, I learned that the police had received the
first rushed lab reports about the botulism poisoning. They now realized what
we knew first—this was not a mundane case of fish poisoning. I read panic in
the terse sentences.

I couldn’t read the hospital reports as easily, but it
seemed the three survivors were hanging on. Herkness was doing better than the
others, and his lab reports tested lower on botulism, so the salsa was probably
the culprit, if the dinner remains were any evidence. Stiles and Bates did not
rise from the dead and walk the halls like zombies from puffer fish overdose.
The botulism on top of fish poison had made certain they were good and dead.

I did not read anything I didn’t already know since, until botulism
came into play, the Department of Health and not the police had been doing the
investigating. I needed to read the reports from the DOH. I had to think beyond
what the police would do so we weren’t duplicating efforts.

I wasn’t held back by the regulations the police had to
follow.

We might have a twenty-four hour head start until someone learned
that Graham was probably the last man to talk to Stiles before the CEO was
hauled off to the hospital.

The police didn’t know about the security breach—yet. What I
really needed was to be inside MacroWare, to see who Stiles had told about the
previously unknown spyhole in their all-powerful operating system. Hackers were
always finding new holes in
browsers
,
but in the system itself . . . I thought that might be something
totally new. And in undistributed beta software—almost totally impossible.

I e-mailed Graham to ask if he’d lowered himself to hacking
into the company’s internal network yet. I got a message back from Tudor saying
he was on it. I tried not to gape in astonishment.

Fine, we were all on the same page. Next.

I went through the Department of Health reports and found
the names of the kitchen staff who had been there that night.

Reading the report, I’d say if Graham hadn’t intervened, the
killers would have won a Get Out of Jail Free card. Accidental puffer fish
poisoning would have gone on the autopsy report of five wealthy men.

It was Saturday. Few employees in the DOH would be working
today unless they were on emergency calls. I rifled through Graham’s files from
the health department—rudimentary at this point. Fugu chefs are trained in
excessive cleanliness. The instant the soup had been served, the pot and all
utensils, including the cutting board, used for the soup had been scrubbed with
special cleaning compounds.

According to the health department reports, Adolph Nasser,
the head chef, asserted that the fish guts had been properly disposed of per
regulations. This involved wrapping them in layers of plastic and taking them off
to be destroyed by chemicals—burning doesn’t kill the poison. They’d tried to
question the soup chef—one Hiroko Kita—but he’d left work on the day the DOH
showed up and wasn’t answering the phone. I didn’t see any evidence that the
police were getting a warrant, so they might be in touch with him by now.

At the time of the report, the DOH hadn’t known about the
botulism and hadn’t tested for anything else. There wasn’t much hope of finding
contaminated salsa or anything else lying around days after the meal was
served, although they were apparently turning over the kitchen looking for any
violations. I didn’t think that was a useful avenue of pursuit.

One of my specialties is tracing people through the sticky
web of computers—it’s paid the bills on many an occasion. I ran Hiroko Kita
through the routine and discovered he’d not been with the kitchen for long.

Suspicion alerted, I ransacked the hotel’s personnel
files—even an amateur hacker can slide into most of those. Human Resource
departments tend to be run by extroverts who like to talk, not people who care
about passwords or computers. All I needed was the hotel’s email address, an HR
employee’s name, and after a couple of tries—the password 4
people.
I sighed and shook my head at the predictability.

Skimming through Hiroko Kita’s slim file, I noticed he had
been recommended by Tray Fontaine, a chef on the west coast. Tray didn’t give
an employer, so I looked him up—he ran the fancy dining room at MacroWare’s
corporate headquarters. Who knew nerds got their own chefs?

Having MacroWare’s chef send a puffer fish cook to serve
poison soup to MacroWare’s execs certainly sounded... fishy... to me.

It was a wee bit early to call the coast, so I dug into Tray
and Kita’s backgrounds a little more. I didn’t find anything that appeared
potentially blackmailable on either of them. I wasn’t planning on
blackmailing—unless I thought it was necessary—but chances were good that
whoever wanted Stiles dead might have coerced one or both of them into helping.

I can’t help it. That’s the way my mind works. Blackmail and
money are the grease that turns the wheels of governments—why not corporations
as well?

I could tell from the files falling into our shared cloud
account that Graham and Tudor were tracking down hotel security staff and happily
erasing Graham’s existence from the meeting room. I’m more of a let’s-get-the-bad-guy
person. I wanted to talk to Kita before the police got there.

There was a nine-year-old fly in my ointment however.

EG would be sulking because Tudor wasn’t there to play with
her. Nick had taken off to have his own life and couldn’t keep her entertained.
She was capable of amusing herself—but a miffed EG should never be left alone.

Our grandfather’s portly butler Mallard had unbent enough to
accept our presence, but I couldn’t continually strain his goodwill by making
him babysit.

Hiding in closets and sneaking around is my preferred modus
operandi. That’s impossible while dragging a child around. How does one query
kitchen staff about a missing worker without going undercover?

Pondering, I dug deeper into Kita, since he at least lived on
this coast. The police report showed they’d looked for him at the address in
the hotel’s records. My eyebrows shot up when I checked my quarry’s credit
report and found a recent inquiry from a landlord at an address in the Adams
Morgan neighborhood where Nick was currently residing. The street was slightly
north of here and not exactly a cheap place to live. How much did fish chefs
get paid anyway? Well, since he was called a
poissonnier
, maybe he got paid for the fishy title.

I looked up the hotel, which was toward the center of the
city—not a bad commute by Metro.

I texted EG to ask if she wanted to see the National
Geographic Museum, which was near the hotel.

She texted a sneering emoji. Okay, so she’d seen the museum
a few times.

The zoo was on the upper end of Adams-Morgan, not precisely
near Kita’s address but a few stops away.

ZOO? I texted.

I got a pouting emoji in return. Tough luck, kid. It wouldn’t
hurt to cruise Adams-Morgan, see if Kita had moved in. He might hide from the
police, but me with a kid...? Pity it wasn’t Girl Scout cookie season.

I texted Nick and warned him we were headed his way. I’d
told him repeatedly that I wasn’t taking full responsibility for EG, that he
had to shoulder his share. He’d agreed. We needed to rope Patra in, but she was
just out of school and needed to try her wings. As the eldest of our tribe, Nick
and I were the ones who had decided to settle down.

I sent Tudor a map of the area we were heading into and
asked if he wanted to go to the zoo. His reply was explicit and impolite.
Teenagers are so predictable—but he’d know where we were if we ran into
trouble.

I threw a few of my favorite spy tools into a tote and went
upstairs to pound on EG’s door. She’d let her bangs grow out, and the purple
dye had faded. She now appeared to have blue-black raven wings clipped back
from her face. She had Magda’s dramatic cheekbones and big green eyes that
would slay dragons in a few years. Right now, they narrowed suspiciously at my
tote.

“I’m not staying with Mallard,” she stated flatly.

“You will if I tell you to, and if that’s your attitude,
that’s what I’m inclined to do,” I said cheerfully. “But if you’ll lighten up,
we’ll go exploring before the zoo. Get your walking shoes.”

“It’s November. It’s forty degrees out there. Who goes to
the zoo in winter?” But she was already hunting under the bed for shoes.

“Fewer crowds, good exercise, it will toughen you up. Want
me to tell you about the winter we spent in Russia where we didn’t need a
refrigerator, we just kept food on the windowsill?”

“Yeah and how long it takes to thaw milk. I’ve heard that
about a thousand times. Tell me what we’re really doing.”

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out.” I watched her drag
on furry boots and suffered a pang of envy.

EG had to go outside to school every day, so I’d bought her
warm clothes. I’d been living in Atlanta last winter and hadn’t needed boots. I
never left my office here if I could avoid it, so I hadn’t bought warm
footgear. I glanced down at my wooly socks and sandals. “Maybe we should go
shopping instead of the zoo.”

“That makes sense. Let’s get Nick,” she agreed eagerly.

My little sister was showing dangerous signs of following in
our glamorous mother’s footsteps. I’d gone the opposite direction, probably
because I couldn’t compete with our mother’s blond beauty. I’m short, my hair
is inky, and I turn nasty when men stare at my boobs, so I hid them. Mostly.
Today, I was wearing a man’s fisherman’s sweater because I couldn’t find one in
a woman’s size at a reasonable price. With luck, I could tuck my braid in a
knit hat and be androgynous.

That hope lasted until we stepped out the front door and ran
into Sean O’Herlihy at the gate.

Ana goes visiting

“That was Graham entering the hotel where Stiles was
killed, wasn’t it?” Sean asked, joining us as we walked toward the Metro. “You
do know Stiles was murdered, don’t you?”

A little history—Sean’s father and my father were Irish
terrorists together. They died at the same time as Graham’s father. Sean and
Graham both had connections to my grandfather and possess a deep-seated neurosis
about bringing the bad guys to justice. I’ve learned to trust both Graham and
Sean, for different reasons.

Other than his insane obsession with digging into Graham’s
activities, Sean was a decent guy, and not bad looking. He had a head full of
sexy black curls and big blue eyes that could float ships. I’d fancied him for
a while, until I realized he was more brother than boyfriend. I think he likes
Patra, but there’s nearly a ten-year age gap between them, so their
relationship remains long distance.

“Hello to you, too,” I said, striding briskly for the Metro.
EG rattled her gloved hands along the wrought iron fences and ran ahead of us.
“Lovely day for the zoo.”

“Dammit, Ana, I thought we were friends. Why not give me the
scoop? There are already rumors flying that Graham was up for a position on the
board. Until that news clip showed up, no one even knew for certain he was
alive.
If he was in that hotel that day,
the police will be all over him before sundown.” He paced angrily beside me.

“You want me to speed them on their way? Do you think I’m an
idiot? We’d be out of a home by sundown.” Knowing that Graham’s story was why
Patra and Sean were breathing down my neck—they not only knew he was alive but
where he lived—I’d given the problem some thought. Sean had been extremely
helpful in the past. I wanted him on our side. But I wouldn’t screw around with
Graham either. Much.

So I’d have to give them something just as ripe. Graham, the
paranoid hermit, would probably bust a gasket at my revealing any info, but
that was his problem.

“As usual, you’re working the wrong side of the street,” I
told him. “I cannot confirm this—I’m not a Macro employee—but Stiles and his
execs were sitting on a potential national security nightmare. Contemplate who
would want that covered up.”