Cyber Genius (30 page)

He reached for his coat pocket. Uh oh.

I flung the extinguisher at his head and took to my heels.

I aimed for the nearest fire door but it burst open under
the power of several camouflage-jacketed goons carrying very large weapons. I
could probably recognize an Uzi if pressed, but guns were guns. They all
killed.

I was so outta there. Not taking time to determine if they
were good guys or bad, I turned and zig-zagged in the other direction.

As expected, automatic gunfire rang out behind me—but no
bullets whizzed by my head. I figured it was just a matter of time.

Tudor’s worried face peered around the corner from the
lobby. At my gesture, he disappeared.

I hated this skirt. I skidded around the corner just as more
gunfire broke loose. This time, bullets hit the wall behind me. That made them
bad guys in my book.

Tudor was outside, shouting into his phone as I burst
through the glass doors. I didn’t hear heavy footsteps following. I figured the
gunmen were finding a less obvious line of attack than running into the street
spraying cars and pedestrians with lead.

“Outta here!” I shouted, grabbing Tudor’s arm and dragging
him through the line of traffic inching down the street. We ran into a Starbucks
packed with frantic people trying to call home. Our abrupt entrance hardly
rated a second glance. They hadn’t heard the gunfire and were dealing with
their own individual calamities.

I prayed the gunmen wouldn’t mow down an entire coffee shop
full of innocent people. “Safety in numbers,” I told Tudor, pulling out my
phone and hitting up Graham’s name. “Go look anonymous in some corner and keep
on doing whatever you’re doing.”

“I can’t. We’re too far out of range,” he protested. “I need
back in the building. The Wi-Fi in these places suck.”

“We need you alive more than we need the internet fixed.” I
shoved him into a chair and stood in front of him, while watching out the plate
glass window. No armed men emerged from MacroWare’s front door.

I got Graham’s voice mail again. “Goons just shot Wyatt
Bates. He was burning papers and sabotaging something from a computer. Tudor
can’t get in to the network to find out what. Your call now. I’m just sitting
here waiting for my limo to roll by.”

Okay, so I’d already changed my mind about isolating myself—a
limo worked just fine when gunmen were on your tail.

Tudor’s Take:

The din in the coffee shop sounded like Tudor’s bunk on a
Saturday night. He shut out the noise and tried to access the network he’d found
inside MacroWare, but it had gone off line. Ana had probably fragged it.

Muttering all the profanities he knew and inventing a few
more, he tried the Starbucks Wi-Fi to reach Graham, but it was overwhelmed by
the frantic crowd.

Graham hadn’t trusted him with an internet connection not
directly under his supervision, but Tudor knew his sister had one. “I need your
cell hotspot,” he told Ana, who was looking decidedly grim as she talked into
her mobile and held up a finger to tell him to hold on.

Knackered, gutted, ready to return to a boring school room,
he glanced out the plate glass front windows. People were running away from MacroWare’s
office. His gut clenched with fear, as if this were a real war zone. He wanted
to burrow down under a table and hide but figured that would look pretty dodgy.

The geek squad from MacroWare poured through traffic in this
direction, and Ana stiffened. Did she see the gunmen? He strained to look, but
she handed him her phone. “Give me yours. Take this and find a place with lots
of exits and a good sight line.”

“Won’t work,” he protested. “I need Graham’s satellite
connections or something way stronger than cellular to finish this job. I just
wanted to see what was happening over there.” He connected her phone with the
netbook, but he was really getting scared. No cops, no emergency services, and
gunmen with automatics were the worst kind of cock-up.

“All right,” she reluctantly conceded, watching MacroWare’s employees
stream into the already crowded shop. “Call Mallard, tell him to use his
creativity to get you past the cops and in the back door of the house. There’s
a limo out there somewhere, give it a call, but I doubt it can fly over
gridlock. Don’t get arrested. Go save the world. I’ll take care of the
stampeding camels.”

That made no sense at all, but confident Ana could do as she
said, Tudor headed for the back door. He’d learned bolt holes at his mother’s
knee.

***

Ana holds a meeting

The MacroWare geeks running across the street were
frantically shouting into their phones. Even the panicked crowd inside the shop
noticed as the first few burst in shouting “Call the cops! We can’t reach 911!
It’s a terrorist attack!”

I sighed. That was bound to lead to logical thought and
sensible results.

“Just common ordinary criminals,” I shouted back. A woman
standing next to me kept yelling into her pricey Peanut phone. Irritated, I
snatched it away. “I need a little attention here,” I yelled. She smacked at me
but I was already climbing on a table—not a pretty sight in the crappy skirt.

“The cyber-attack is coming from inside MacroWare. They’ve
blocked emergency services,” I fabricated. The roar of hysteria didn’t lessen.
“All of you, sit the hell down!”

No one listened. I kicked the shoulder of a big man shouting
into his cell. He turned to glare, and I took his phone too. “Pay attention!
Shut this crowd down so we can save ourselves.”

The clamor reached jet engine decibels. I couldn’t possibly
yell over it.

When the big man didn’t seem interested in helping me, I
figured he deserved what came next. I pulled my super-whistle from under my
blouse and blew hard enough to puncture eardrums. In a small room like this,
the effect echoed off high ceilings and ricocheted like bullets.

That did the trick. People held their ears and turned to glare.
Well, I’d tried to make them listen. Every time someone started talking, I
shrieked the whistle. Even dogs learn after a while. The crowd started thumping
any of their fellows stupid enough to argue.

“Where are the gunmen now?” I asked one of the late
arrivals.

“Searching the building,” he shouted over the heads of my
audience. “Wyatt was supposed to be getting us back online while we waited for
the fire department. What’s going on?”

Okay, the smoke had been a distraction. That made sense.

“The city is shut down,” I told them. “Emergency services
can’t get through. And my bet is that Wyatt wanted it that way. I’m also
betting he’s dead and the gunmen aren’t.”

That got the crowd murmuring again. Only half the people in
here knew what I was talking about.

While I waited for the crowd to sort things out and more MW
employees squeezed in, I handed the big guy’s phone back to him and unwillingly
gave up the pricey Peanut-phone. I hated being stuck with Tudor’s piece of crap,
but at least it had Graham’s secret contact number in it.

“You’ve got two choices,” I informed the crowd once I had
them listening again. “I can’t make them for you. Wyatt sold you out. I don’t
know how badly he’s sabotaged your servers, but all emergency services are
currently offline, and that seems to include jamming the street traffic
computers. He was killed before he completed whatever he was doing.”

Whispers passed through the crowd. People were snapping
shots of me, making me nervous. But I had my hair hidden by my knit hat and still
wore the bulky coat. I shouldn’t be too recognizable. They waited for me to
finish, and that was all I could ask.

“The goons who killed Wyatt are still out there, probably
looking for me. I didn’t interview them and don’t know.” That produced some
nervous giggles. “You could, and probably should, try to find your way home and
hide until the dust settles.”

“And the alternative?” some smart ass in back asked.

I focused on that guy because he was paying attention and
reading between the lines. No geek glasses or knit cap, big build—I pegged him
for ex-military, at the very least. Testosterone driven, for certain.
Interesting. “You go back in and straighten out whatever Wyatt did and bring
the city back to its feet again.”

Several people cheered that suggestion. I figured they
weren’t MacroWare employees who would have to risk their necks.

“Anyone choosing to go back in—find a leader,” I suggested.
I didn’t see any pin-stripe suits in here ready to earn their hefty salaries
and lead their employees into the fray. “You’re going to need someone to
coordinate your efforts.”

“What about you?” military guy asked.

“I don’t have your knowledge of computers. And I have some
bad asses to kick.” Just as soon as I figured out how to go where I needed to
be to kick them.

I jumped down from the table and left them arguing. I didn’t
hold out a lot of hope for an office full of sales people, but I’d done the
best I could. Sales people knew other people. They could make it work if they
put their heads together.

People tried to grab me to ask questions, as if I were the
only authority around, but I didn’t have any answers. I threatened them with
the whistle if they held me up, and stepped on toes until they let me pass—out
the back, after Tudor.

I discarded my black coat on an employee coat rack and stole
an equally cheap fake-down jacket in bilious green nylon. It had one of those
squared-off, billed caps smashed into the pocket. I wasn’t squeamish about lice
when bullets were more likely, so I left my black knit in trade. Then I eased
into the alley, keeping my eye out for goons with guns. In the growing dusk, I
was as likely to startle them as vice versa.

I checked Tudor’s phone and hit up Graham’s fake number.
“You might want to meet me at the hospital,” I cheerfully told his voice mail.
The call would go through as Tudor’s, but I didn’t think he’d have a problem
figuring out the trade-off. “Or maybe not, because I’m going to kick your shins
for not answering our calls.”

I traipsed down the alley and headed for the nearest Metro.
I wasn’t hiking out to the hospital in this weather.

Wyatt had been a peon. He may have killed Hilda, but a hired
professional had killed Kita. I couldn’t see a geek salesmen like Wyatt knowing
assassins. And the poison plan... well, he might have come up with some portion
of that, but he wasn’t high enough up the MacroWare ladder to have been at the
head honcho table, and I was betting he wasn’t smart enough to be there either.
Wyatt was merely the puppet. I was after the puppet master.

There had been only one person at MacroWare with the clout and
financial skills to associate mortgage companies, MacroWare, and Top Hat. I
didn’t have all the connections yet. I couldn’t envision Wyatt poisoning his
own brother, for instance. And it was hard to see how anyone at the head table
thought they’d survive if they poisoned themselves along with everyone else.
But time was running out. I had to start asking the really tough questions from
men who were surrounded by security.

The Metro was chaos but still operating. I was feeling
lonely out here on my own, facing another foray into the impossible. A normal
person would have called it a day, gone home and had dinner and let Graham
handle his own idiot problems.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t bent that way.

Tudor finally texted that he was safely in the carriage
house. That didn’t mean he hadn’t been seen or that the police wouldn’t come
calling. I just had to hope that the cops or the FBI would be safer than
gunmen.

I had no idea how to reach my objective once I arrived at the
hospital where the MacroWare execs resided. The poisoned CEOs were out of ICU
the last I’d heard, but it wasn’t as if anyone was advertising where they’d
been moved. I could look for floors with heavy security, I supposed. The
hospital had coyly refrained from posting a map of their internal corridors
anywhere on-line.

I hit the first restroom I found when I entered the main
doors. I needed to stash my bilious green coat but I figured I wouldn’t get it
back if I left it on a stall hook. Hospital environments are so darned sanitary
and uncluttered.

The phone rang, although since it was Tudor’s, I didn’t
recognize the ring. I glanced at the number and it appeared to be an
international call. “What floor?” I demanded, hoping it was Graham but figuring
I could scare Magda if she was trying to call Tudor.

“Cafeteria, basement, kitchen door. The food tray racks are
lined up there.”

Graham clicked off before I could tell him that rolling
racks couldn’t talk and wouldn’t help me find anyone.

I found a directory map of the hospital lay-out, located the
cafeteria and employee-only areas, and took the elevator down. Maybe I should
become a kitchen worker. I could reside in my natural underground habitat all
day and theoretically never get shot at.

Given my personality, that probably wasn’t a sound theory.

The bilious green coat got stashed in an unlocked locker. In
the laundry room, I debated camouflage. I preferred anonymous scrubs. But I
didn’t want to give up the bag of tricks in my attaché, and I was wearing black
pumps. Not too many overworked nursing assistants wore pumps and carried
attachés. So white coat it was.

I hoped Graham had eliminated security down here because I
had no name tag and no ID and no business in these environs. I sauntered into
the kitchen corridor as if I belonged. Hoping my white coat was camouflage, I
took a clipboard out of a rack and began flipping through charts, pretending I
had a clue what to expect.

“About time you got here,” a familiar rich baritone
complained.

A tray rack mysteriously emerged from the ranks and rolled
toward the elevators. “The top floor patients complain if we’re even a minute
late,” the rack said.