Cyber Genius (7 page)

“Stiles may not have known the extent of the breach that
night,” Graham continued, “but he recognized enough of the possible disastrous
repercussions to call me in. He didn’t have time to send all his files before
he was hospitalized, so I don’t know what kind of actions—if any—have been
taken already. And under the circumstances, I’m wary of hacking MacroWare right
now or revealing information he gave me in confidence.”

“So far as we know, none of this actually affects the internet,
right?” I asked, voicing Tudor’s terror. “The web remains up and running?”

He shot me a puzzled look over his shoulder. “The internet
does not run on MacroWare.”

A fat lot he knew if he didn’t realize Tudor’s monster could
chomp into website servers through that damned hole. But he didn’t know about
that... yet.

Graham halted one of the dinner videos and backed up. A plump
waitress in a discreet black pant suit was slipping entree dishes onto the
table while the men laughed and ignored her. She was white, not young, not
pretty, just efficient.

Graham took a screen shot and sent it to my mailbox. “Start
there when you research the list of kitchen staff I sent you.”

“She didn’t cook the soup, and I’m not seeing her shooting
up the veggies,” I protested, reverse bigotry in full sail. I wanted the old
white dudes to be guilty.

“Chain of command. Who assigned her to that table? Who handed
her the tray? I need you to ask the questions. I cannot be found and drawn in
for questioning—I know too much about subjects that are irrelevant to murder.”

I assumed his paranoia had a substantial basis given his
checkered career. And knowing the underbelly of governments, I didn’t argue his
point. Given his level of knowledge, Graham was a ticking time bomb a lot of
agencies would like to get their hands on.

“I may have to disappear until this case is solved, so I’m
leaving a lot in your hands,” Graham reminded me in a grim voice.

“Not the cat, I hope,” I said facetiously, but he had opened
the subject uppermost on my mind. “Tudor can help you. He knows more about the
breach than anyone. He’s willing to tell you what he knows, but I’m not willing
to get him involved in murder unless I know we’ve employed all possible
caution. I need to work with
all
my
family on a job this large.”

He quit clicking his keyboard, sat back, and actually looked
at me. That didn’t happen often. I straightened, crossed my arms, and waited.
His dark eyes, razor-sharp cheekbones, and square jaw could be intimidating,
but physical appearance didn’t daunt me as much as brains. Graham possessed
more than should be humanly possible.

“How much family and how involved?” he asked, sensibly. He understood
Tudor’s talents and would question him in geek-speak later. The rest of my
family, on the other hand, were capable of starting nuclear wars if called
upon.

“Not Magda,” I assured him, “unless one of her boyfriends is
involved. But Tudor knows programming and hacking. Patra can ferret info out of
media files. Nick has Brit intelligence resources at his fingertips. Relying on
each other is how we work.”

He glowered, then returned to the videos. “My business
relies on secrecy. It’s much easier for me to operate if no one but my clients
know I exist or how to find me. Patra is building a career on revealing
information I’d prefer was kept private. The media are obsolete and no longer
the protector of our constitutional rights.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” I retorted, intelligently. “Media are
gossips, voters are uneducated idiots, the government is corrupt, and what
exactly has changed in centuries? You use the tools you’re given. We need
information. I obtain it through connections, not cameras on every corner.
Obviously, your methods are different. We either combine forces or I go back to
my clients and translating letters from Thailand.”

As a virtual assistant with international contacts, I often
juggled translations, scientific research, and communication for a variety of
scholarly clients. Graham had taken advantage of my skills and contacts more
than once. He had to trust my knowledge or we couldn’t do this.

“You’ve never had to keep this level of confidentiality,” he
argued.

“I was Magda’s right hand man for twenty years,” I responded
in a voice heavily laden with sarcasm. “My grandfather was her tutor as well as
yours. Do you really think I led a charmed life while you were dining with
presidents?”

“I don’t like it,” he said flatly.

“You should have thought of that before you took an ego trip
to meet Stiles in person instead of Skyping. Get over it. Find a new business
model, whatever. You were the last person to see Stiles before the ambulance
carried him off. Half MacroWare’s board is ready to pin motive on you, the
interloper, a man with the ability to
cause
the breach. Your neck is on the line and our priority is to save it. Deal with
fall-out later.”

Prioritizing, I excelled at. Choosing between going hungry
and running for my life—piece of cake. Graham was dithering over the method of
his downfall. “You’re getting soft,” I taunted.

“I could just disappear again,” he retorted angrily,
stopping the video at the speech-making part of the dinner.

“Or you could clear your name, move on, get a life, get help
for agoraphobia, any of the above. Anything I can do, you can do better.”

“That’s not how the song goes,” he said wearily. “And
you
are still hiding in the basement.”

“I’ll happily move into your attic. Look, stop the footage,
go back.” I pointed at the screen where Stiles was at the podium,
gesticulating. “There, stop there.”

In the background, the same waitress was quietly clearing
the head table. None of the execs looked green yet, although they’d obviously
finished their dinner.

“Herkness scraped off his salsa and he lived,” Graham said,
focusing his formidable attention on the scene.

“Did all five test for botulism?” I watched as the blond VP
of PR waved away his plate while seemingly fascinated by his boss’s boring
speech.

“He might just not like salsa,” Graham warned. “This does
not make him a suspect. We don’t even know the salsa was the source of the
botulism.”

“But from the medical reports, Herkness is far more likely
to recover than the other two—which certainly points fingers at the salsa.
You’d better get security on him, whatever the case. And now will you admit
that I’m not an idiot, and I know how much to tell my family and when?”

“I know you’re not an idiot, although spotting salsa isn’t
proof. It’s Nick and Patra I don’t trust. I don’t like wildcards. Tudor better
know enough to make my agreement worth it.”

“Tudor is the one who warned MacroWare about the spyhole.” I
stood back and waited for that to sink in. “He has some illusion that he
notified Stiles directly, although I’m not going to ask how he came up with a
private email.”

“Crap.” Graham uttered a few more choice expletives as he
ran through a screen apparently monitoring Stiles email account. So much for
not hacking.

“Search on Kinghenry with a UK address,” I told him.

Tudor’s email appeared in seconds.

“He should learn to spell,” Graham said dryly, reading the
cryptic text that was more a Twitter hash fest than anything legible.

“He buried the info in tweets,” I ventured. “Follow the MacroWare
hashtag and his signature on Twitter.”

“I hate working with amateurs,” he growled with a sigh,
setting one of his monitors to Twitter.

“You hate getting old and out of touch. The kids have been
using this format to get around Magda’s nosiness for years. Or think they’re
getting around it. Who knows if Stiles followed it, but someone might have.”

He returned to surly mode and ran a search on hashtags to
show he wasn’t out of touch, but I could tell I’d hit a sore spot. As Tudor’s
panicked message emerged amid myriad other MW hashtag messages, he growled in
disgust.

The once very public Amadeus Graham thought he was his own
CIA. He was pretty darned good at it. But as I’d learned to my displeasure,
sometimes, one had to live life to learn new things.

Graham apparently thought he only needed computers. I had
made it my goal in life to disillusion him.

Tudor’s Take:

Ana was a bossy pain in the arse, but Tudor was eager to
meet dodgy Graham, who played the family strings like a meta-gamer. Ever since they’d
learned Amadeus Graham had taken over Grandpa’s mansion, Tudor had been digging
into Ana’s rat in the attic, but the bloke was impossible to ferret out. Graham
had firewalls beyond anything the NSA had ever developed. For that reason
alone, Tudor wanted to check him out.

Nick had said the house and its contents were worth
millions, and Old Max had left it to all his grandkids. With his share, Tudor
figured he could quit school and start his own software company. But no matter
how deep he dug, he hadn’t uncovered anything to get the sod thrown in jail. If
Ana hadn’t been able to do it... But she never told him anything, so he didn’t
know what she had up her sleeve except lawsuits. He’d be out of school and a
corporate drone before they’d be settled.

EG had begged him to take snaps when he went to Graham’s
office—she had never seen their landlord and she was living here!

But standing in the doorway of Graham’s creepy attic room after
breakfast, Tudor was pretty shaky about even entering.

The man in the chair was big, and the office . . .
beyond
awesome
. Tudor stared like a
dork for a full minute at the bank of computer monitors. He could swear one was
showing Nick entering the embassy, but it switched to a hospital too fast to be
certain. How could anyone watch all those screens at once? ADD much?

And then Tudor spotted the Twitter screen following the #cookiemonster
tag. His stomach sank to his shoes.

“Would you like to explain the software that allowed you to
breach the government’s visa website?” the hulk in the chair asked without greeting.

Tudor had the weird feeling the man had eyes in the back of
his head.

“The worm was only supposed to remove my footprint,” Tudor
replied defensively, glaring at the incriminating evidence on the screen. “No
one has the right to keep track of all my information.”

“There is no law that says they
can’t
track anyone who enters their website,” Graham pointed out.
“Quid pro quo, you want their information, you have to give them yours. You
don’t want their information, stay off their website.”

“I didn’t
mean
to
use it on the visa site,” Tudor said defensively. “I just forgot to turn the
program off. But the worm was programmed to only eat
my
information. It should never have gone past the data folder.”
Tudor took a deep breath and asked his greatest fear, “Did it gut anything
vital?”

“Besides national security?” Graham asked dryly. “No, it
seems to have been content with destroying only the data level where user
information is stored. One hopes that was backed up elsewhere and that they
shut down before the worm could attach itself to other documents. Just the fact
that you breached the State Department’s firewalls is chilling enough.”

Thankfully, the room was too dark for anyone to tell he’d
been sweating. Tudor swallowed a lump of relief. “But someone with real spyware
could have gone in through that hole and stolen all the info, right? That’s
what I told Stiles.”

Graham dialed up a screen showing Stiles’ personal email
account, the one Tudor had turned up from his hacker buddies. He opened up
Tudor’s coded email. It looked pretty pathetic up there on the wall.

“Stiles is dead,” Graham said bluntly. “He died soon after
he had the software tested and found the holes in the websites you told him
about. He found more.”

Tudor grokked that Ana thought Stiles had been
murdered
because of the spyhole. The
stories he’d read had said food poisoning. He didn’t think he was important
enough to have been personally responsible for the death of his hero, but he
would gladly take down anyone who might have done it. He asked warily, “And
what do you want me to do?”

“Go to MIT, get out of our hair, don’t show your face here
again,” Graham said. “But what I want and what I need aren’t necessarily the
same, as your sister has so crudely pointed out.”

“Yes, sir,” Tudor said with caution, not entirely
understanding. “I don’t have the funds to visit MIT. Does that mean it’s safe
for me to go home? I can ask Ana for a loan.”

“No, it’s
not
safe
for you to go home, not with your fine hand all over that Twitter account.” He
gestured at the screen before working some magic with his keyboard and making
all the messages disappear, leaving the Twitter screen blank.

Tudor watched in awe as Graham ran a search on the tag he’d
just deleted and nothing showed up. He’d
wiped
the tag clean from the public Twitter database. How was that even possible? Well,
it wasn’t, entirely, but the copies would be buried so deep in such obscure
places, someone would really have to know what they were doing to find them.

As if he hadn’t just performed magic, Graham continued, “I
would recommend eliminating all your social media accounts and lying low,
preferably forever. A mind like yours is a frightening thing.”

“Yes, sir.” Tudor wasn’t certain where this was going. His
people skills often failed him. “Ana told me not to use your network, though.
Should I go to a library?”

Graham kneaded his forehead before speaking. “No, you cannot
leave the house until we find who killed Stiles and why. That person is
ruthless, and if his motivation had anything to do with the security breach,
then you’re in danger. You will delete all trace of yourself using a computer
not connected to this network. I will set up a new identity through a server in
Uzbekistan for your use. Send me a copy of your damned monster program, and
keep it out of the O/S breach this time. Once you’ve eliminated your social
media, start tracking who has had access to the affected software.”