Cyber Genius (4 page)

He didn’t have a hacker program that worked with the tablet.
He couldn’t crack the code. If Ana had set it, his software probably couldn’t
hack it either. She didn’t know programming, but she was devious. She had the
smarts to take the basic hacking knowledge he’d given her and run with it.

He ran down the list of available networks until he found
someone’s laptop that was unprotected. Pathetic wankers.

The signal was weak. He sat on the window and moved the
tablet around until the signal strengthened. Would Ana give him access to her
network later? He couldn’t do much at this speed, but he had to know how big a
shambles he’d made.

Fingers trembling, he tuned in to the tablet’s search engine.
It came up as always—the internet hadn’t totally collapsed then. Maybe that gave
him a little time.

He checked MacroWare’s site to see if they’d announced an
emergency security update.

Instead, he read the headline about the death of Stephen
Stiles.

Gahhhh, nooooo!!!!!!

Paralyzed in shock, he simply stared for a full stomach-churning
minute. The geek king was
dead
? How
was that possible? Stiles should be invincible, like Superman.

But
fish
poisoning? That was so cocked up!

Selfishly, his next thought was to wonder if there’d been
time for anyone to consult with Stiles about Tudor’s message. Had he set his
programmers to fix the hole in the O/S?
Oh
blimey bloomin’ hell
... what if he hadn’t?

Desperately, Tudor searched for news of crashing websites, a
dangerous worm eating government data, or a security update.

He found nothing.

Rocking back and forth and moaning, realizing he was not
only up a creek without an oar, but sitting on the bleeding Titanic, he
wondered what in the name of Ramses he did now.

***

Ana lingers in Graham’s lair

I shoved my hands into the pockets of the old corduroys
I’d worn to the airport and stared at the back of Graham’s head. “Murdered?” I
inquired innocently, as if I hadn’t been sitting on fear all morning.

His black cat leapt from his lap, circled my ankles in
disdain, and escaped through the door I’d left open. I sneezed, which added to
my irritation.

Having my paranoid conspiracy fantasies confirmed wasn’t
supposed to happen. “Food poisoning hardly qualifies as murder.”

“Puffer fish numbs the mouth. Anything else in the food
wouldn’t be detected.” He brought up a health department warning of symptoms on
one screen, then what appeared to be a hospital medical record on another. “Knowing
puffer fish had been served, doctors had no reason to look further than the toxicology
reports showing toxic levels of tetrodotoxin in the blood stream. The symptoms
and evidence are correlated to the fish.”

If I hadn’t known about Tudor’s little problem, I would have
shrugged and said
food poisoning, got it,
just like everyone else. But food poisoning of execs sitting on a potentially
major operational failure that could cause stockholders gazillions... that had
my suspicious mind on edge.

Graham had said murder. Why?

“And?” was the only reply I could summon.

“The symptoms disguised massive botulism poisoning.” He
crossed his arms over his chest and glared at a new screen he’d keyed up.

Even sitting, Graham was a big man, with wide shoulders,
broad chest, and powerful arms. It was warm up here in the windowless attic, so
instead of the heavy sweaters the rest of us wore, he was wearing a
long-sleeved T-shirt that clung lovingly to pectorals and biceps. I wanted to
swat him upside his thick head of ebony hair just for existing, which
admittedly made me surly.

“Not making sense yet,” I warned. “Botulism is still food
poisoning, not murder.”

“Botulism is overkill. I doubt the doctors looked for it. I
had to confiscate a blood sample and have it tested.” He grunted and wielded
his keyboard to open a few more screens of talking heads.

Graham said outrageous things like that all the time without
apology or explanation. Nick’s employers had a right to be suspicious about
him.

“Why?” I demanded, knowing I had to drag every grain of
information out of the tight-lipped rat. “Why would you test a sample when the
doctors are satisfied with puffer fish?”

“Stiles kept a pretty close monitor on his food, hiring
special chefs. He wouldn’t hire an incompetent
fugu
chef,” he said, fine tuning a camera showing a hospital
entrance. “I get paid to know things like that. I am not idly living off Max’s
millions.”

Wow, a personal admission, two, actually. A new first.

“I never thought you stole our inheritance. I thought our
grandfather’s lawyer smoked all the money,” I said angrily. “Did you think I’d
live in the house of a callous crook who would rob little children?”

I was stunned that he thought I’d considered him a thief. A
lying, conniving, creepy spider in the attic who had misappropriated our house
by legal means, yes, but a common thief, never. He was a brilliant man who’d
been on a high-speed destiny path and had worked with the president of the
United States, for pity’s sake. He probably still worked for the CIA or
worse—that had always been my vision of him.

So, he wasn’t a philanthropist but a paid security something
or other. Big freakin’ deal.

This was probably the longest and most revealing
conversation we’d ever had. Usually, we flung a few insults, played competitive
head games, and got back to work. I had to wonder where this was going—and
worry.

“Max was ill, not stupid.” Graham opened a document on
screen showing a bank transfer receipt with a whole lot of zeroes on it. “He
started moving funds before he died. That could have precipitated his death.”

My grandfather’s coke-sniffing renegade lawyer had robbed,
then poisoned him, but that ship had long sailed. The lawyer was dead now and couldn’t
be our current culprit.

I stared at my grandfather’s name on the bank receipt and
got wobble-kneed. Our inheritance might still be out there? That realization
had me hunting for a place to sit before my legs collapsed under me.

Unable to find a chair in the dark, I folded up and took the
floor. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” I wanted to shout and kick and
throw a tantrum, but that wouldn’t impress Graham. “That’s
our
money!”

Money that might buy back this house. Or put the remaining
four of my younger half-siblings through college. Probably not both house and
college, especially if MIT was their goal, and all the others demanded an equal
share.

“I don’t have the code to access the funds or the time to
figure it out,” Graham admitted. “Swiss banks will sit on assets until the end
of creation before they’ll release accounts, unless you can find the access
code. I’m simply telling you that I earn my money the same way you do.” He
clicked a switch and the receipt was replaced by a lab report.

“Like heck you do,” I muttered. I knew how to swear in
twenty languages. I’d trained myself not to for the sake of my younger siblings,
but sometimes... I needed to kick something—like Graham. “I’d have to work
fifty hour days to afford this set up.”

“People pay for my knowledge and contacts. You don’t have
anything worth that kind of dough,” he said.

Before I could smack him upside the head for the insult, he
turned around and dropped the shock bomb. “I’ll give you all the information I
possess on your grandfather’s accounts if you’ll work this case for me.”

My jaw dropped but no sound passed my lips. The explosion in
my head was so huge that it took a few moments to process all the ramifications
of his declaration. All the normal questions like “Why now? Why me?”—and the
fury that he’d been concealing Max’s accounts—coalesced into one loaded shell
of sarcasm.

“Giving me the information on Max’s money amounts to paying
me with my own coin! Why can’t big bad you do it yourself?” I said.

He didn’t even shrug. “Because once the cops get smart and
realize Stiles was murdered, they’ll be coming after me next. I have both
motive and opportunity. The murderer couldn’t have set me up better if I’d
planned it.” He slumped wearily in his high-backed desk chair.

His computer screens didn’t provide adequate illumination to
read his expression, but I could read his body language. He was tense and
desperate.

“What motive?” I demanded, because that sounded really bad.

He hesitated. Obviously, he wasn’t interested in coming
clean across the board. I refused to budge until he answered.

“Let’s just say that Stiles had a few close... associates...
who took a different career path. I don’t want to bias you with those reports. I’d
prefer you look at everyone, but several people on the managerial level were
about to be fired. At least one of the ill executives argued against the firing
and others accused Stiles of letting me run the company. They’ve started internal
rumors of my replacing the board. After the murder charge is placed, they will
report all this to the police. Once the police realize I do exist, they will
happily believe I’m capable of corporate takeover by puffer fish, especially
since I was in the hotel that night. It will be incredibly difficult to find
the real murderer if I’m behind bars.”

I knew Graham was secretive about his identity. Amadeus
Graham, hermit extraordinaire, would not normally walk into a major company
like MacroWare as himself. He would have used an alias. What identity the board
feared wouldn’t matter once the real Graham’s existence was confirmed.

“If those associates are the prime suspects, would they really
kill off Stiles to get at you?”

“It’s possible that they’re stupid,” he grumbled. “But there
are other elements involved. I don’t want to taint your investigations by
listing my enemies when the motive could possibly be elsewhere.”

“I’m not a detective,” I reminded him. “I can’t even read
that lab report that seems to have set you off. If the police are satisfied
with food poisoning as an explanation, I can’t even see why you’re worried.”

“Puffer fish poisoning isn’t always deadly. A lot of it
depends on how much is consumed and the physical condition of the person eating
it.” He brought up another medical screen with a list of botulism symptoms.
“But it will lower the immune system sufficiently for another poison to
complete the damage. I called for the blood work because they didn’t have
enough fish poison to die.”

I skimmed the article and slammed into the remedies.
Botulism could be cured! “If you’re saying they had botulism as well as fish
poisoning,” I nearly shouted in shock, “
have
you called the hospital
?”

“Why the hell do you think I’m worrying?” he shouted back,
proving he was unusually unnerved.

Normally, we’d both be taking out our panic by kicking and
beating bags in the gym, but we didn’t have time for that.

“I sent an anonymous warning,” he said wearily. “They should
be treating the surviving three for botulism now. Once they recover, they’ll start
talking, and that’s when the cops will start looking for me.”

I finished reading the article. This was all quite
fascinating, but I wasn’t seeing direct connections to Graham or Tudor, my main
concerns. “They were eating badly canned veggies?” I asked, grimacing. “That
does not compute.”

“Of course it doesn’t. That’s how I know it’s murder.
Someone deliberately added tainted food to their entree. It takes hours for the
symptoms to appear, so the kitchen was already clean before anyone became sick.
The rules of puffer fish preparation require complete removal of all remains
immediately. The health department searched Thursday, after Stiles was
hospitalized and the diagnosis of fish poisoning was made, but any trace of the
meal was long gone. The killer knew what he was doing.”

“The killer must have had motive and opportunity too,” I
protested. “If you were there, did you see who was with them?” I loved a good
puzzle. I wasn’t loving this one.

“Are you saying you’ll work with me?” he asked.

As much as I liked having him by the short hairs for a
change, I resented the insult. “What, you think I’ll let them hang you and let
a killer go free?”

He didn’t so much as blink an eyelash but continued as if
I’d said
yes.
“I’m on retainer to
hunt security breaches in MacroWare’s software as well as their internal
network. Stiles recently alerted me to a national security breach and demanded
that we meet in person.”

Uh oh. Here it was. Even knowing heads were about to roll, I
couldn’t resist curiosity. “You’d never met? He paid a fortune to an invisible
spy in my attic?”

He swiveled his chair enough to give me a gimlet glare. Beneath
thick lashes Graham has deep dark eyes that could skewer with just a look.

“They
pay
for
invisibility. You do the same, so quit gloating, or you’ll be arrested for
harboring a criminal when I go down.”

I could just move out, but I wouldn’t, and he knew it.
That’s what happened when I let people into my life. They owned me.

“Ok, fine.” I waved a dismissive hand as if I was handed
national security assignments every day. “Did you meet Stiles?”

“Only briefly. He wanted me to join them at dinner. I told
him that was a ridiculously reckless idea. I arranged a suite to meet in
privacy and had the place swept for bugs while they ate. Only Stiles and Bates,
his right hand man, came up to the room. This was several hours after dinner
and speeches, and they weren’t feeling well. They pointed me at a security
breach, and I called a doctor for them. I left them with staff, but if a whiff
of murder comes out, it won’t be difficult for the police to trace my
presence.”

“You don’t see any connection between a security breach and
poison?” I asked, not so innocently. “Did you look for the breach?”