Cyber Genius (28 page)

Rolex invaded Tudor’s personal space, pushing him back
toward the desk. “Start with
this
computer. I’ll get out of your way.”

This was a plush office, not an anonymous cubicle. Tudor
craved anonymity. Contact with authority made his skin crawl. He was probably
supposed to know this dork’s name and bow to his grandiose title. But the guy
wore no badge, and the door label merely read Vice President of Sales.

Why would a sales guy care about security?

“I don’t usually work this way,” Tudor said, glancing
longingly at the door Mr. VP blocked. “I’ll have to back-up your entire drive,
and I didn’t bring any extra externals with me.”

“It’s all backed up,” VP said proudly, patting a dusty older
model drive behind a stack of report files.

Tudor bit off a
whatever
that would have given away his age. “Fine,” he agreed in a surly tone.
“Just don’t disturb me. I need focus. Just one missed piece of code could take
days to unscramble.”

“Right. Make certain that spyhole they’re talking about
isn’t in there.” Smiley-face stood in the doorway until Tudor took a seat at
the ergonomically incorrect computer console. “I’ll stop by a little while
later to see if you need anything.”

“I can take care of myself,” Tudor muttered and opened the
screen—no password. This prat really never used this machine, did he? He rolled
his eyes and said nothing as the office door shut behind him. Maybe this
wouldn’t be so bad after all.

That’s what he thought until he tried to access the main
frame. A red alert message filled the screen, warning an unsecured application
was being executed.

The firewall threw up barriers and the screen went dark.

***

Ana fights another day

After the knife-stabbing incident, the kitchen’s shocked silence
erupted into cacophony. Since no one offered to help me catch their furious
head chef, I raced into the corridor after Adolph. I didn’t know what he was up
to, but I wasn’t ready to let him escape until I had answers or he gave them to
the police.

Livingston had asked about aphrodisiacs. Bates had said the
salt shaker contained aphrodisiacs. Adolph hadn’t denied drying fish liver. Had
Livingston asked because Bates had asked him? Or was the hotel manager the
inspiration for this little tongue numbing experiment? Since Bates was dead, Adolph
had some explaining to do.

Once in the block-wall passage, I saw Adolph stalking toward
an exit on my left—and Brian Livingston and security approaching from the
elevators on my right. They looked grim.

I now knew that the hotel manager was a Rose minion who had
hired Adolph on Tray’s recommendation. Except for my dislike of Senator Rose,
that wasn’t suspicious in itself. Livingston had not been in the room where
Hilda had been shot—but his staff could easily have shorted the wiring for the
real killer. That was pure speculation.

Not knowing how deeply the manager was involved, I went
after the devil I knew. I turned left, in pursuit of Adolph.

Security shouted at me. As previously noted, tight skirts
are lousy for running. I yanked the hem up my thighs but Adolph had a head
start and the security goons had longer legs.

To my relief, Maggie stepped out of a side corridor carrying
a heavily loaded tray. I didn’t think her appearance was an accident. She
looked wide-eyed but determined as she balanced the tray.

Reaching her, I grabbed the weapon she proffered. With ill
intent, I flung the tray and all its contents at the security goons. I hoped
that was fish soup soaking their black blazers. Calamari appeared to drip from
one guy’s forehead.

Maggie winked, then screamed dramatically as she dropped to
her knees in the middle of the floor to retrieve her broken crockery, blocking
the corridor. This returning favors business worked both ways.

I raced after Adolph. Behind me, I heard the goons cursing
as they slid in goo, tripped over Maggie, and crunched her dishes.

Adolph had almost made it to the elevator I had taken once
with Euon, the one leading to the parking lot. I’d never catch up with him if
he got outside. I yanked my skirt higher and picked up speed. “Down, Adolph, or
they’ll shoot!”

I could have been lying. Hard to say. Security was cursing
and mad enough to shoot, at least.

Adolph threw himself to one side of the hall and slumped to
make a smaller target—military training, maybe. At least he knew he couldn’t
outrun bullets.

I swung around, waving my kitchen knife threateningly at the
angry security guys. “No closer. Call the cops, if you want, but you don’t
touch this man.”

Since they probably had been after me, that messed with
their minds a little. With their shoes still slick from the mess Maggie had
created, the guards slid to a halt and quit reaching for their guns. Behind
them, Livingston looked panicked.

Now we were getting somewhere. I liked panic on the face of
my victims.

My phone rang with the Batman theme. It was a lousy time for
my spy in the attic to finally put in an appearance. “Get Adolph before the
goons do,” I ordered before Graham had a chance to say a word.

“Tudor is at MacroWare. They’ve just shut down all their
servers,” Graham countered.

I had no idea what that meant beyond the urgency of his
tone. “I’ll get on it.” Since he was right upstairs in the hotel with all the
security monitors, he had to know what was happening down here in the kitchen.
“How close are the cops?”

“They’re at the back door.” He clicked off.

Well, at least he hadn’t told me to get my ass out of this
mess. That would be stating the obvious, I suppose. At least he’d called the
cops for me and given me enough warning to haul my petite derriere out of sight
before they dragged me to their torture chambers and forced me to give up Tudor.

“Adolph, if you don’t tell the cops what you know, I will,”
I said, glaring at Livingston and not the defeated chef. “I recommend that all
of you start talking while the rest of us try to put Humpty Dumpty back
together again. MacroWare is going down and taking a lot of fat cats with it. The
fate of the western world really could be on your shoulders. Try that hat on
for size, cowboys.”

I ran back to the corridor where I’d last seen Maggie just
as the elevator door burst open with the boys in blue.

Apparently watching for me, Maggie swore beneath her breath
and followed me down the side passage.

“Try that hat on for size?” she asked in incredulity. “Did
you just pull out every cliché you know?”

“Obfuscation and smoke clouds make for great escapes. My
brother is in trouble,” I told her, racing for the unknown. “How do I get out
of this maze?”

“This way.” She led me through a warren of service tunnels
and elevators until we were at the loading dock in back.

“Think positive,” I told her, punching the button to open
the wide loading doors.

“I positively think you’re nuts and I’m going home,” she
declared, stalking out onto the dock with me. “I’m not working with killers.”

I didn’t try to rearrange her thinking. Adolph was no master
mind, just an angry, needy idiot who would sell his shriveled soul for money. I
needed the real killer. I’d been putting two and two together. If I subtracted
Adolph from the equation, the result led straight to MacroWare—where Tudor had
apparently ensconced himself. I had a real nasty feeling about that.

I gripped my kitchen knife harder. Maybe I ought to learn to
use a knife, but for right now, for my purposes, it was useless.

It was dark as we traversed the delivery alley. I offered my
weapon to Maggie for her trip home while I peeled off in the direction of MacroWare.

A black sedan waited for me at the end of the alley. The way
my life was going, I prayed it hadn’t been sent by the ghost of Stephen Stiles.
Or his killer.

***

Tudor’s Take:

“Bugger it!” Tudor shouted at the abruptly crashing
computer. Fighting panic, he shoved back the executive’s chair and headed for
the door.

It was locked.

He stared in incredulity for much longer than he should
have. Ana would have been quicker off the mark. She’d told him he was getting
soft. He hadn’t understood—until now.

Even as an ankle-biter he’d had enough gray matter to
recognize that animals reacted violently and irrationally when trapped. He’d
apparently been nattering with a desperado and hadn’t caught on. He grokked
computers, not people, blast it.

A quick glance around his prison revealed an office where no
one actually worked. No filing cabinets. No big desk drawers filled with
potential weapons. No souvenir swords on the wall. Just one old computer on
some prissy furniture and a stack of paper.

Old trick—he checked the ceiling. Acoustic ceiling tile,
probably on an aluminum grid. Tudor climbed onto the desk and shoved up a tile.
He wasn’t heavy, but even his weight was likely to pull that flimsy grid down.
But there had to be supports up there somewhere.

He pushed the desk to the wall. Fancy wood or not, a desk
without real drawers weighed nothing. He climbed up again and found what he
needed—a steel beam he could haul himself out on.

Once he got himself into the space between floors that
housed all the building’s wiring and ducts, he had time to think.

Rolex Prat had lured him down here and locked him in
deliberately. Had he recognized Tudor and gone for the feds? Or had he just
pounced on any stray IT person? Why? To blame him for the crash? That seemed
most likely. Rolex Prat had needed a sucker to take the fall—for what? What was
the prat doing?

Unwilling to give up this chance to access MacroWare’s
servers and save the internet, Tudor eased along the beams, listening for
activity. Mostly, he heard shouted obscenities. Had all the servers crashed? He
cursed the acoustic tile that prevented hearing normal conversation.

Wondering if any of the wires that he was crawling over
might be cable he could connect to a computer, he started removing ceiling
tiles and peering into offices. One good laptop would be a start.

His phone vibrated. He didn’t want to answer it and admit he
was in trouble, but he really needed to know what was happening.

He glanced at a message on the screen.

all emergency servers crashed. get out
now.

From Graham. The man was damned spooky. Did he know where
Tudor was right now? And what the bloody dickens did he mean about emergency
servers? Did they have them at MacroWare?

Or did he mean cops? Ambulances? Almost anything operating
on MacroWare could conceivably be shut down—just the same way MacroWare updated
its software—invisibly, while people slept. The possibility that computers to
the police and fire departments were offline froze his guts.

Brain power worked better than panic—new mantra.

Taking a deep breath, Tudor found a messy but unoccupied
office. On the desk below gleamed a really hot new netbook. Score! He swung
down from the beams and shoved the little beauty into his shirt before climbing
back into his hiding place. Years of video gaming had taught him when to hide
if he wanted to win the treasure.

Turning on the pricey little machine, he checked the battery
power and admired the speedy processor with enough RAM to fuel the CIA.
Satisfied, he closed the tile and crept to a safer surface to see what
connections he could make.

Judging from the icons, the office’s wireless network had no
signal—a very bad sign. Graham hadn’t provided a smartphone with cellular
access. Without his hacker programs, it would take forever to manually crack
any of the other networks.

He really wanted into MacroWare’s servers. If they were
down, all his plans would go pear-shaped.

Grumbling, he sent Graham an encrypted text with the
password to his cloud account where he’d stored the program patch. He didn’t
know if the patch would work. He’d wanted to test it while everyone else was
fighting crime. But if everything blew up in his face, he wanted back-up out
there.

Once that was done, he began hacking at the various networks
the system was showing.

He smelled smoke just as he finally broke into a secure
network named MWSucks.

Ana freaks out

The sedan isolated me from the panic in the streets. Looking
out the tinted windows, I only saw worker bees hurrying harmlessly down the
sidewalk. I couldn’t hear the buzz or sense their anxiety as I had earlier.

But the message from Graham about emergency service computers
blacking out was sufficient to escalate my adrenalin. How much did the police
and fire departments rely on the internet? What about hospitals?

From my luxury seat, I couldn’t tell anything was wrong.
Riots weren’t breaking out in the street. But the further we traveled, the more
stoplights seemed to be out. I vaguely remembered reading about a complex
network that allowed computers to change signals in emergencies and rush hour.
That network was obviously not working. Cops would have to take subways to
bypass the traffic tie-ups. Not good.

The internet on my phone wasn’t fast enough for me to flip
through the necessary websites to understand what was happening. Texting worked
best. I messaged Tudor.

He actually texted back.
mw going up
in smoke
was his cryptic reply.

Oh damn.
I glanced
out the window—the major thoroughfare the limo was traversing had turned into a
parking lot. I couldn’t take it anymore. I pounded on the driver’s window until
he opened the glass.

“I’m outta here,” I told him. “Keep heading for MacroWare.”

He lifted a hand in understanding. I shoved open the door
and jumped into the unmoving traffic, dodging between hulking SUVs blaring
their horns—as if miles of cars would magically disappear to satisfy the impatience
of Type-A morons.