Undercover Genius (3 page)

Polished, ultra-cool Patra literally squirmed in her chair.
She ran her long fingers through her chestnut locks and didn’t meet my eyes.
“You’ll make me leave if I tell you.”

Shit
. “I’m never
going to escape Magda, am I?” I asked with resignation.

Only a sibling would understand my reaction. Patra looked
miserable. “I just talked to a few publishers I knew, gave one of dad’s
recording to a few people. Dad’s material is old, but it’s pretty explosive. I
just wanted to see if there was any interest in my researching his death as a
finish for the book.”

“And?” I raised an expectant eyebrow, although my dinner was
already curdling in my gut.

“Someone set fire to his papers and destroyed my apartment.”
She sank deeper into the chair if that was possible.

“Someone deliberately
burned
you out?”
This was why grandfather had left us this security-laden
fortress, and why I would fight to the death for it. My family required armed
encampments for safety. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “If the papers were
burned, what can you hope to accomplish by pursuing a book your executor
couldn’t sell?”

“The papers they burned were mostly transcripts of Dad’s
recordings. I’d made audio files of the old tapes and stored them in the cloud,
along with a scan of his research files. The thieves couldn’t touch them,”
Patra said with a mulish expression I recognized well. She handed me a CD.
“I’ve made copies of his more dangerous stuff. Just listen to this one.”

I popped the disk into my old un-networked Dell, verified
the intercom had been turned off and the talking lamp unplugged so Graham
couldn’t hear us, then hit
PLAY
.

* * *

“My party is
prepared to support the general’s request to escalate,”
an unaccented,
arrogant American baritone said.

“
The weapons lobby
backing you?”
a cynical, less grammatically constrained American voice
asked
. “Or the oil industry? Or both?”

“Unless we want
terrorists controlling the world’s oil supply, my request for escalation is the
only solution,”
a crisp, commanding voice said.
“But the media will raise hell unless we have all our ducks in line.”

A bored Brit drawl intruded.
“The Arabic station is ours. We can feed a propaganda frenzy whenever
it’s needed. Just be certain all your pawns are in place, because once the
rioting starts, there will be no stopping civil war.”

The arrogant American responded. “
We’ve acquired newspapers in France, Greece, and Germany. These things
take time — and caution. The American media will take longer to convince,
but we have officials in place who can pull the right strings, and our own
mouthpieces to start the shouting. We’ll be ready.”

“Freedom of the press
isn’t all it’s cracked up to be over the pond, is it?”
the Brit asked
mockingly.

“Everything can be
bought for a price. But there are still a few obstacles,”
the authoritative
one said. “
That’s what I brought you here
to talk about. You have a wild card in your deck who needs to be dealt with.
He’s been snooping where he shouldn’t — ”

* * *

The voices on the CD quit speaking after a knocking sound
in the background. I reached over and ejected the disk.

“A
general
is
talking about manipulating governments and bringing down a foreign regime
through propaganda and the
media
!”
Patra said in indignation. “They’ve bought the media — TV stations,
newspapers, radio! Just to keep oil companies and weapons manufacturers afloat.
Millions of people died for their greed! I think this reflects part of the
conspiracy my father was writing about. If Dad taped this, and anyone learned
about it, they may have had him killed. I need to hire someone with voice
recognition software.”

Danger, Will Robinson
was
the first idiocy leaping to my mind.

I didn’t need any more conspiracies on my plate. Rich politicians
monopolizing the textbook industry had nearly cost me EG and had almost
certainly ended our grandfather’s life. Greedmeisters buying up international
media to put their own puppets into place — probably in oil rich countries —
was business as usual as far as I was concerned.

So I rolled my eyes at Patra’s suggestion. “You want the
kind of fancy software they have on woo-woo shows where the cops compare voice
patterns to identify the baddies? Not happening, babe. No database.”

“They can do a spectro-analysis of the voices in that file. All
we need to do is provide recordings of potential suspects for comparison. Once
we find matches, we can positively identify the speakers through science,” she
said stubbornly. “I sent a copy of that file to an analyst recommended by a
friend of mine, and he’s pretty excited about it. He thinks I’m on to
something.”

“But the analyst needs money for the analysis,” I finished
for her, beginning to see the light.

“Yeah, but all the men I want to record are here in D.C,”
she said with more excitement. “We can do this, Ana. We can prove some pretty
powerful men are manipulating the media for their own immoral purposes, and
they killed my dad to cover up his findings!”

Ah, the innocence of youth. Did I have any right to burst her
bubble with my apathetic cynicism? I gave up fighting for causes long ago —
probably before I was EG’s age, since my father had been killed when I was
four. Survival was the name of my game.

Except I was learning that family was why we needed to
survive, and I knew her pain. “How much?” I asked in resignation.

She named a sum that left me sputtering and glad EG had a
scholarship to her private school.

As reluctant as I was to do it, for the kid’s sake, I had to
roll out the big guns. “And if your thieves discover you still have evidence,
will they come burn us down too? Or just put a period to your existence?”

Instead of moping, Patra sat up straight, donned her best
Magda superficial smile, and tapped her pretty chin. “What, little ol’ me? How
could anyone think I’m dangerous? I’m too dumb to use a smart phone.”

We both stayed up too late. Patra made copies of her audio
file, then started researching the names of every VIP who might have been in
the vicinity when her father died. Back then, Patrick had apparently been
slipping in and out of Mideast war zones by way of any country he could bribe
his way through. With no date or location for his tape, Patra had her work cut
out for her, but she was like a pit bull on her quest.

Our best guess was that the power moguls on the recording wouldn’t
have done the shooting. Our only real clue was that one spoke English with a
hoity Brit accent, two others were American, and one was a general.

Neither of us had spent much time in the States. We couldn’t
identify regional inflections, but one of the American accents sounded
professionally blended by a good speech therapist. My bet was on a politician,
but I was prejudiced that way.

I spent the evening researching our options on the voice analysis.
Even though I could buy software and save money, I concluded if we wanted a
professional job, we would have to pay professional prices. But we might be
able to sort out the unlikely suspects and narrow the speakers to be analyzed,
thus reducing cost. Patra emailed her friend Bill with the go-ahead for
spectrum analysis on the voices we already had and told him we’d give him
comparisons as soon as we could.

I sent him a down payment out of the family account we’d
established a few weeks ago with Nick’s gambling winnings. There are only so
many casinos on the eastern seaboard, and he’d be banned from them all if he
took any more hauls like the last. I doled those funds carefully. Our family
had learned at an early age about the dark undersides of life. Even if we had
to eat peanuts for dinner, we always kept an emergency stash.

I was accustomed to long hours with no sleep. Patra had jet
lag. She eventually dragged off to bed and left me to arrange an automatic fund
transfer emptying Reggie’s offshore account into the fake business account I’d
set up a few weeks ago to catch a money launderer. Ah, the irony! I now knew
how to launder my own money.

Since it was legally inherited, I wasn’t hiding anything from
the feds. I had to hide it from Reggie’s creditors, of whom there were many,
most of them unsavory.

I’d darned well let the lawyers work out inheritance taxes
on embezzled funds. We now had half a mil at our disposal, although
technically, it needed to be divided among all of us. I was still thinking of
it as the house fund, since the house had been left to all of us, too.

I was up in the morning in time to see EG off to the
alternative school we’d found for her. The school encouraged the use of iPads
instead of ancient encyclopedias for research, provided a variety of resources,
and satisfied EG’s genius level of world knowledge. No more complaints about
right-wing propaganda and textbooks that ignored Darwin. That didn’t mean she
didn’t complain, but we’d eliminated her legitimate problem with her other
schools and now merely dealt with her conjured ones.

Since Nick still hadn’t put in an appearance, I refrained
from mentioning his arrival before school. EG would want to stay home and have
one of our celebration parties. I figured Nick would prefer to crash first.

The intercom in my office sat ominously silent when I
returned to my office. As careful as I was, I had little hope of hiding
anything from Graham for long.

I loved this house with its connection to a time when I’d
felt secure. If Graham already knew we’d found our lawyer, he could be plotting
our imminent departure. A man who had never had the human decency to come down
and introduce himself was capable of anything.

I’m not much at suffering in silence, but I wanted to see
Nick safely home before confronting our resident ogre about our continued
residency.

Organizing my files on Broderick Media, I concluded I ought
to read Patrick Llewellyn’s notes in case there was anything pertinent to my
project. Patra’s father had worked for a legit news organization and not
Broderick’s sleazy tabloids, but he still might have some interesting insights
into the competition.

I hesitated before opening Patra’s files on my computer.
Graham had access to anything I did on the Whiz, the fancy computer he’d bought
for my use and networked to his. Patra hadn’t given me permission to share. If
I loaded her files into my non-networked Dell, I’d have to use my mobile device
to follow links, and it didn’t have the power of Graham’s spooky satellite
accessibility.

And then I realized Patra had left both the CDs and her USB
drive on the table where anyone could pick them up. I wasn’t convinced Graham
had the ability to leave the third floor since I’d never seen him do so, but
Mallard was his flunky, and our butler was home now. The old Victorian’s
kitchen was in the cellar, just down the hall from my office. He had a suite right
next to it. With a good lock pick, he had access to my office.

As a precaution, I ran Patra’s files through the Dell,
verified there was nothing obviously explosive, then uploaded them to the Whiz
for a more thorough investigation.

“I was wondering if you’d trust me with that information,”
the intercom said dryly.

This is the reason I usually turn off the machine. Admittedly,
I have trust issues, but I’d conquered a few of them where Graham was
concerned. He’d let us stay here when he didn’t have to. He’d helped us save EG
from a kidnapper. While I resented his high-handed authority, he was currently on
the Good Guy side of my list — except for that owning my house business.

I sat back and began scrolling through the pages that Graham
was apparently reading as we spoke. “Trust? What does trust have to do with it?
They’re Patra’s files. Her privacy is the concern here, not your nosiness.”

As usual, he ignored my snark. “Patrick Llewellyn was a
brilliant man who despised Broderick. You won’t be able to run your usual
search on his private data. He learned coding from the British army. I’m
sending you links to several databases that might help unlock the code he’s
using.”

My eyes might have popped out of my skull except Nick chose
that moment to arrive home. I could hear him singing overhead and cheerfully
greeting Mallard. He’d apparently found better libations than the fresh orange
juice and champagne I’d asked Mallard to have ready for him.

Since the intercom light had gone out, I assumed Graham was
done with me. I made a mad dash for the stairs. Nick was waiting for me with a
big grin. Even though he was wearing grubby cut-offs and a fishy-smelling polo,
I flung myself into his arms and nearly bowled him over.

We might not do affection in our family, but enthusiasm
comes with the drama queen territory. He swung me around in circles until he
staggered.

“That was fun. When can we do it again?” he asked, dropping
me back to the floor under Mallard’s unsmiling reproof.

“The staggering or the Caribbean?” I inquired.

“The catching of sniveling thieves. The bondsman you sent
was a hunk and a half, thank you!” Tanned to a golden brown, with new gold
highlights in his disgustingly blond hair, handsome Nick looked as if he’d been
born on a yacht. Knowing Magda, maybe he had.

“I didn’t think you were into blue collar hunks, but
whatever works. I hope next time you go sailing, we can all go with you.”

Nick shook his shaggy hair. “I’ve found a buyer for the
Patsy
. If I never have to sail it again,
it would be too soon.” He held out the front of his striped shirt with disgust.
“Verify the value of the yacht, if you will. I have a cash offer of half a mil.
And now I’m off to bed to sleep for a week. Or until I go back to work in the
morning.”