Undercover Genius (28 page)

The pattern followed through all of the various Busties and
Chesties on the front pages of the gossip sheets. I didn’t know who gave a crap
that the liberal entertainers got smeared with bad news and the conservative
flag-wavers came out smelling like — pardon the expression — Roses,
but if it sold papers, someone must.

So, in the midnight hours, I papered most of Hollywood with
discreet inquiries and copied Patra on all of them. Let her really work
entertainment news.

Patra’s perspective

People swiveled to stare as Patra strolled through BM’s
offices on Wednesday morning. She’d dressed for stares. She’d dressed to demand
respect. Wearing an Armani jacket and skirt with her Gucci heels, she strode
through the cubicles with her head held high and her best smile on. She
liked
making them stare. She hoped it
threatened the hell out of the monsters behind that spy mirror.

She carried weapons they’d never understand in her imitation
Gucci shoulder bag. She intended to leave a strong impression before she left.
She’d make them think twice about coming after her later.

She wasn’t happy that she hadn’t uncovered the evidence she
needed to pin Broderick to her father’s death, but she would never have a
chance to expose him if she was dead. So her parting message had to be
memorable.

No one said a word as she took the chair at her desk, not
even the office manager who had to allow her to log into the system. So, she
wasn’t fired yet. She had no idea which desks her team mates had occupied, so
she didn’t know if the empty cubicles had been theirs.

She went online to check her personal email before she went
to work subverting the system with Sam’s aid. She nearly laughed aloud at the
flurry of irate messages from her Hollywood contacts asking if she knew about
Broderick’s propaganda campaign.

What the hell had set them off? She read deeper and found
Ana’s message at the bottom of several — asking if they’d noted that
left-leaning actors got smeared and right-leaning got promoted in the gossip
rags. The examples the messages fed her provided enough material to write a
book.

And one tiny clue amid the rants:
Beware the Righteous and Proud interviewers. They tape everything and
manipulate your words to suit their purposes in their propaganda sheets. I
thought I was talking to good Christians and ended up being toasted in hell.

R&P had interviewers?

She didn’t have much time but she did a quick Google search.
The organization had its own newsletter with a huge audience. The interviews
they printed came from their role models — including Hollywood names. The
R&P had the power to build a strong fan base.

Broderick’s television stations and newspapers acted as a
mouthpiece for the R&P. Media fed off each other. Any interesting
interviews would be picked up by conservative pundits and Poo Manor.

R&P’s journalists would most likely have taped their
interviews and seemed the likely source of the audio files invoiced to Dr.
Smythe. She didn’t have time to dig deeper.

She IM’d Sam Adams:
Ready?

You’re sure your guy
will hire me after this?
he IM’d back.

Yep.
She’d already
had a talk with Sean. He’d agreed that anyone as enterprising as Sam Adams
would be an asset to a real newspaper office. If nothing else, Sam could get
their new computers up and running.

Send it on then. I’m
taking out some insurance.

Whistling under her breath, Patra called up her personal online
document folder and copied the first installment of the exposé she’d written. The article revealed times, dates, and events
connected to BM’s media propaganda and practices prior to the Iraqi revolution,
taken from her father’s files. She pasted the article into her BM word
processing program and sent it directly to Sam.

The system required that he vet any articles passed for
publication and forward questionable ones to his manager, but that wasn’t
happening today.

This method of bypassing the system wouldn’t have worked for
long if she and Sam intended to keep their jobs, but they didn’t. So once was
enough.

A few minutes later, while she pretended to work on her next
Hollywood story, her office phone rang. She tapped one of her earbuds. All she
got was one long, appreciative whistle. She grinned.

“Same to you, buddy,” she replied, cutting off.

She closed up her computer and moseyed upstairs to have a
word with a few of her least favorite execs. All she needed was a few curse
words shouted into her recorder as she tendered her resignation.

After walking EG to the Metro, I returned to my cave and
began setting wheels in motion. I didn’t care about Graham’s research or any of
my other cases today. I had one goal and one goal only in mind — bring
down the menace who had attempted to kill my sister.

I worked through the papers Patra had rescued from Bill’s
files. Tapes #2844 and #3926 had the names of
Smedbetter
and
Smythe
on
the file label. None mentioned Broderick or Riley. I emailed Sean a request for
copies of those audio files.

Sean was apparently working along similar lines. He emailed
the audio files back to me within the hour. I passed them on to the speech
analyst in Seattle. With Magda’s verification that Smedbetter, Bloom, and Riley
were all in the wrong place at the same time, I couldn’t dismiss coincidence.

I wasn’t entirely certain how Whitehead, a Brit and an
embassy employee, figured into any of this, but he’d been in Kirkuk and again
in the Mideast five years ago. There had been a Brit accent on Patra’s tape. I emailed
Nick asking if there were any Whiteheads on the embassy staff here in D.C. —
because his offer of a job seemed a mite too Machiavellian.

Dr. Smythe worried me, too. He didn’t work for BM directly.
He hadn’t been in any war zones that I could determine. He was the connection
to Riley, not any of the warriors. He’d killed our lawyer, which had nothing to
do with anything as far as I could see. It had been some of his R&P people
who had helped hunt Patra down, but he’d been busy being arrested during the
zombie race.

I was hesitant about taking my next step. It would be
tricky, and it would involve Graham. I didn’t want to play all my cards at once
unless I had a good chance of results. I liked as much information as possible
before I blew up my world.

Patra sent me a cackling e-card of triumphant witches. I
took that to mean she’d appreciated my Hollywood amusement, and that she was
still alive. No one at BM had shot her down in cold blood. Yet. I got cold
chills thinking about her working that nest of snakes.

It was too early in Seattle to expect the speech analyst to
get back to me. I wanted loose ends tied up, and I didn’t like waiting. I
tapped my fingers on my desk, considered all the parameters, then, in an act of
desperation, I emailed Graham with my query. I politely didn’t disturb his
privacy with the intercom the way he disturbed mine.

No
was his instant
reply.

I’d expected that, but I was still furious. It wasn’t as if
I asked things of him unless I was utterly desperate. Flat out refusal was just
rude.

I’d already debated my alternatives if politeness didn’t
work. The one I liked best involved power tools. I slipped across the street,
liberated a couple of battery-operated macho man toys, and dropped them into my
canvas sack while the workmen were taking a smoke break. I was back in my
cellar before anyone noticed.

I may have mentioned a time or two that I excelled in hiding
while growing up. My introverted self craved privacy and my curiosity demanded
answers, so I learned how to locate secret doors and hide from the best spies
in town. I’d not had the time or incentive to hunt for my grandfather’s secret
passages, but I’d threatened to do so enough that Graham really should have
been warned.

He’d been in my locked
cellar office.
That ticked me off enough to justify my next step. I’d
chosen the cellar for my office because it’s pretty hard to put secret doors in
solid concrete walls. A normal person might assume he’d picked my door lock or
obtained a key, except I’m not normal. I always left tape or a hair or other
marker to know when my door had been opened. Even though CDs had been removed
from my desk, the markers had never been disturbed.

Graham being Graham, he may have just found some sneaky way
to put the markers back, but my privacy had been disturbed in too many ways on
other floors. Knowing my mother and grandfather, I was pretty damned certain
there were hidden passages.

I eased down the cellar stairs with my tool trophies and
checked Mallard’s kitchen and premises. He was gone, as I’d also expected.
Graham’s curiosity about my note would not be assuaged until he’d sent Mallard
to do what I’d requested. He simply didn’t intend to tell me about it, the
secretive bastard.

Humming to myself, I tapped along my roof. No one had
bothered adding acoustic tile or plaster board for a real ceiling. All I had over
my head were the century-old boards and supports for the floors. When I found a
section that sounded different from the rest, I flashed my light over it. Sure
enough, there were the nearly invisible cuts giving evidence of chicanery. A
trap door would allow anyone reasonably athletic to simply drop into my abode.
Climbing out would be a bear for a short person, unless they came prepared with
a rope ladder.

Someone tall and muscular could lift themselves up. I
drooled just picturing Graham performing that feat.

Spiderwebs coated most of the dark corners since I didn’t
allow Mallard in here to clean. I’d set off a bug bomb before moving in, so I
wasn’t too worried about actual creepy crawlies. The area in question, however,
was remarkably clear of dusty webs. Really, the deceptive bastard deserved
anything I threw at him.

Just the idea of Graham lowering himself into my cave like
GI Joe on a mission riled my temper. That man had to learn to play fair, or at
least behave like a normal human being and ask permission. No more stealing CDs
off my desk that weren’t his.

Humming the Halloween tune EG was currently using as her
security alarm, I ran up to her tower. She usually left her door unlocked when
she wasn’t there, in brave hope that Mallard might actually change her linens
at least. Her room seemed relatively neat, so I assumed she’d rid the place of
bats and Mallard had generously cleaned up. He really deserved more than we
could pay him.

I dismantled her mp3 player with the Halloween theme song,
unburied a few of her electronic toys, and returned to the cellar. I checked my
computer but Seattle hadn’t come through yet. I really wanted those voices identified
before wreaking external havoc. As long as Patra was safe, I’d stick to
internal chaos for now.

Standing on a chair, I ran a power drill into the boards
over my head and created a hole large enough for the power saw. I used the saw
to open a hole large enough to use as a handle. I yanked down at the old planks,
but they wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t see hinges. I had to assume the door lifted
up, not down — a nuisance which made my job harder but not impossible.

I turned on the mp3 and slid it through the hole, then wound
up one of EG’s toy bats and shoved it through. The stupid thing flew into a
wall immediately but kept flapping around, banging into things — like more
walls in the hidden passage.

I returned to the first floor and headed for what once
probably had been a family parlor. In my grandfather’s last bedridden years, it
had been turned into a bedroom. It came equipped with a marvelous modern
bathroom with a Jacuzzi and was now an unused guest room.

Sure enough, between the new closet and the new bathroom, I
heard the sounds of spooky music and a banging bat. I opened the closet,
flashed my light around, and found the seam for a door in one wall. Right about
now, the weird noises in the closet ought to be drifting up through the passage
and irritating the hell out of Graham. The image cheered me considerably.

With a little exploration, I found the pressure spring to
open the hidden closet entrance. This was a new device, probably installed at
my grandfather’s request in the last decade.

Whistling along with the creepy music, I opened the entrance
to the hidden passageway behind the closet wall. A handle carved into the wood
floor revealed the escape hatch to my office. Metal circular stairs led upward.

Collecting my toys, including the flying bat, I started
climbing. I located the door on the bedroom landing and opened it — one of
the unused bedrooms. Graham had better be very glad it didn’t go through my
study. It was bad enough that this relentlessly masculine bedroom was next to
the study and may have once been my grandfather’s.

I wasn’t exactly being quiet. I hummed along with the spooky
mp3 music. And the wind-up bat in my hand kept squeaking. I had a suspicion
Graham would be waiting with the latest assault weapon if I tried actually sneaking
up on him. I wound up or snapped on a couple more toys when I climbed the next
set of stairs to reach the door at the top.

I gauged the position as opening directly into his enormous
office. He’d locked it, of course.

I took my power drill to the lock, then kicked it open,
letting my mechanical bats and mice loose at the same time. I flattened myself
against the closet wall as the creatures crashed into ceilings, monitors, desk
chairs, and scampered off into hiding under desks. All to the mp3 tune of a
weird TV theme song about monsters.

I was trying very hard not to laugh as Graham’s irate curses
flamed the air. Leaning against the hidden staircase wall, I heard a gunshot
and a bat squeak, followed by a stomp and another squeak. The wind-up bat would
be a little tougher to reach, but it would wind down eventually, possibly after
taking out a monitor or two. I was nearly bent double picturing the chaos in
Graham’s tightly controlled universe.