Undercover Genius (4 page)

He stumbled toward the stairs, met Patra coming down, gave
her a hug and an air kiss, and ascended in a cloud of
eau de poisson
. Fish and lack of dry cleaners would explain his
dislike of yachting. Nick favors tuxes and delicate sauces flavored in fresh
herbs with veggies. Fish that stinks isn’t his forte. If he had to gut his own
meals these past weeks, we’d be going on a no-seafood diet for a while.

Petra stared after our normally sartorial perfect
half-sibling in astonishment. “What happened to him?”

“I’m assuming he sailed without crew to protect his
prisoner. I’m sure we’ll have the whole story later. Your father’s files may be
coded. Eat while I start looking into them.”

I dashed off, trying not to gloat too much over the cool mil
we’d soon have in our coffers. I, of all people, knew money corrupts. I’d much
rather have the house. But it takes money to run a house like this. No mixed
feelings here, no, sir.

I began sifting through Graham’s code websites using various
seemingly innocuous documents from Llewellyn’s files. While the programs did
their thing, I had time to start ticking off my to-do list.

Grandfather Max had left everything to his daughter Magda’s
children — which divided our funds worse than was immediately apparent.
Five of us had more or less grown up together. A sixth, who would be a couple
of years older than EG had he lived, had died in a fire-bombing I hadn’t been
able to prevent. Poor little Antony was the reason I’d gone ballistic when
Magda had become pregnant with EG. We couldn’t protect the kids she already
had. Adding another to the menagerie had been more than my heart and soul could
bear at the time.

After that, I’d sworn off all religion along with my
parents’ Catholicism and walked out. I eventually flew to the U.S. and hid, until
EG had found me.

And now here was Patra, leading trouble straight to our
doors again. All of which left me debating whether I really ought to provide
the home we’d never had — or just parcel out the funds and be done with it
and them.

I really wasn’t liking that last idea, but I hadn’t been
appointed ruler of the world either. And there was still another issue that I
wasn’t entirely certain the others realized. As the oldest, I’d always been
Magda’s secret keeper, and she had more secrets than even I knew.

But I knew about the twins. They’d been born in the
eight-year gap between Patra and Tudor. Patra might be too young to remember.
Nick had been off getting educated in England, courtesy of his lordly father. Magda
had been living in the Rand outside of Johannesburg with a South African
diplomat. The twins had been adorable, more coffee colored than white, a boy
and a girl. They’d been kidnapped by their father’s family, and I hadn’t seen
them since. They’d be about twenty now, and I saw no reason they shouldn’t be
included in our bounty.

Magda never spoke of them, but I was betting our Mata Hari
had never stopped looking for them. Magda isn’t an airhead by any means. She
was tenacious and she was smart and as underhanded as the devil. If the twins
were alive, she’d know where, and if she hadn’t gone after them, it would be
because she’d decided they were better off where they were. Money might change
that.

So for now, the funds would only be used to pay the lawyers
for the sake of the whole family. I researched the yacht as requested, and
learned Nick’s offer was less than Snake Brashton had paid but a fair enough
price. I should have asked Nick if he’d coerced the thief into signing over the
yacht title so we didn’t have to bring in cops and lawyers. My bet was on
Nick’s smarts, but I added the question to my list.

Then I returned to the de-coded documents on my screen.
Negative. No coding found. I plugged in some more pages from different folders,
and started looking for more coding programs. If Patrick Llewellyn had thought
it necessary to use very obscure codes to hide his work, he’d been playing with
nuclear material.

And home-burning thieves probably had lots of incentive to
be hot on my sister’s trail.

Patra’s perspective

Patra ate the amazing breakfast Mallard laid out for her
and almost forgot her agenda. Their family had a butler! And a mansion. Well,
maybe they didn’t own either if she listened to pessimistic Ana, but all this
splendor had belonged to their
grandfather —
a man she’d thought existed only in Magda’s fairy tales. They could have
been living like kings all these years instead of running one step ahead of
creditors or bumming off whoever was unlucky enough to invite them in. She’d
like to hear the real story behind Magda’s exile.

But at least the family’s roller-coaster upbringing had made
it possible to move in any circle and survive anywhere, which she would need to
do if she were to fill her father’s very large shoes. Had he finished his book
on the atrocities of war, and the real reason they’d been committed, he might
have single-handedly put an end to the Mideast conflicts. He certainly would
have exploded a lot of erroneous patriotic beliefs.

It was too late to stop the damage already done. Her
journalism degree was just a piece of paper in comparison to what she’d learned
from her father.

Not that she’d ever spent a great deal of time with the
late, great Patrick. He’d always been traveling. But his papers were an insight
into the man she wished she’d known, and the journalist she wanted to become, so
he hadn’t died in vain.

To that end, Patra couldn’t keep relying on her big sister
for answers. She had every intention of infiltrating Broderick’s insidious
conglomerate and proving that it was cynically and deliberately manipulating
information to achieve an agenda that looked blacker and nastier the deeper she
dug into it.

She’d ace the interview with Broderick. And then the fun
would begin.

Hearing the ancient plumbing gurgling through the pipes
over my head that afternoon, I finished up what I was working on and dashed up
to the ground floor for Nick’s grand entrance.

EG was home and almost bouncing with excitement by the time
he sauntered downstairs after his beauty nap — which meant she was reading
the encyclopedia and glancing at the stairs every three minutes. Patra had been
out all day and only just returned home. She, too, looked up eagerly from her
paperwork.

“What did you do with the toad?” EG demanded the instant
Nick entered. “Torture him into returning our money? Are we rich? May I have my
own computer now?”

Nick rolled his eyes and looked to me for help. He’s not too
much into family decisions. I nodded at the front door, prepared for this.
“Celebration time! Get your jackets, we’re going out.”

Last time we had celebrated, we could only afford gelato.
Not this time. This time we had
money
.
I was practically dancing in my sandals.

But my main goal in going out was to keep family business in
the family. That wasn’t possible in the house with our omniscient landlord. My
secondary goal was to give EG the kind of family experience the rest of us had
never had.

I’d booked a table at a new Cajun restaurant down the street
in Dupont Circle. We’d eaten Moroccan food in Casablanca and Greek food in Piraeus,
so we didn’t need an ethnic dining experience, but we’d had very little
American cuisine. One of these days we might make it to New Orleans, but for
now, this place would suffice.

The zydeco music was catchy as we walked in, and the table
was as private as I’d requested. Admittedly, my siblings were dressed a little
better for the occasion, but my denim skirt and T-shirt weren’t all that bad. I
worked in a basement and didn’t need to dress for the public. Well, except now.

“Interesting choice,” Nick said mockingly, scanning the
menu. “Mind if I skip the gumbo?”

“Blackened everything for you,” I agreed. “Next time, you
choose. We can still order champagne if you like.”

“I think this is cool. I particularly like the red satin
shirt.” Patra nodded approvingly at a roving fiddle player with dark eyes and
thick curly hair.

Nick glanced over his shoulder. “Greek, not Cajun. Met him
in a bar last month,” he said dismissively.

“Will you quit stalling?” EG said impatiently. “Are we rich?
Can we buy our house?”

“No and no,” I told her. “But we have a nice nest egg that
gives us options. Let’s hear Nick’s story. He’s the hero of the hour.”

We ordered a pitcher of beer and a pitcher of non-alcoholic
punch and Nick took great pleasure in regaling us with his adventures. He could
have just called our thieving lawyer a drugged-up pushover and been done with
it, but where was the fun in that? So over our meal we heard about Snake Reggie’s
wild orgy aboard the yacht that Nick had crashed. The party had ended with the
crew mutinying and Reggie trussed in the hold while Nick sailed off one step
ahead of the authorities. No one cared enough about Reggie to rescue him or his
yacht.

“Do you think we can nail him for Max’s murder?” I asked as
the tale wound down. “He was the only one who could have delivered the poisoned
envelopes.”

A few months back we’d arrived too late to save our
grandfather’s life or our inheritance. We arrived in time to uncover Reggie’s
embezzlement, and for EG to be kidnapped by a rogue from a mysterious political
cabal called Top Hat. I’d been rescued by a hunk in a tux and diamond cufflinks
after I’d wiped the floor with the baddies. Reggie had been part of the mess we
were still cleaning up.

Nick shrugged. “Reggie was sobbing so badly by the time I
turned him in that his lawyers can probably beg him off on an insanity plea.”

“He can’t afford lawyers. We have our money back,” I said
with the satisfaction of knowing the funds were safely transferred back to our
account. “He’ll have to be assigned a public defender. I don’t think he has any
family left who cares what happens to him.”

Karma paid off. Reggie had hurt a
lot
of people. It was time he paid the price.

Patra’s phone tinkled, and she held up an apologetic finger
as she answered. Her excitement as she talked caught our curiosity. When she
hung up, we waited expectantly.

Unaccustomed to this much family interaction, she hesitated.

“Our new family motto is all for one, and one for all,” I
informed her.

“That’s a stupid motto,” EG retorted. “Who’s the one and
who’s the all?”

But Patra had had time to consider, and she beamed
obligingly. “That was Bill. He’s been playing with the audio file I sent him,
and he thinks he’s found a match for one of the speakers already. I told him to
meet us over here.”

I didn’t like mixing dangerous business with family, but at
least she wasn’t bringing her contacts home. “Try not to let your friends know
where we live,” I warned.

Nick and EG waited to be filled in, but it wasn’t my story
to tell, and Patra returned to admiring the wait staff. Annoyed, EG resorted to
her best attention-getting device. “If you mean Bill Bloom, he’s a loser. You
won’t get anything useful out of him.”

“So says our very own Cassandra,” Nick said, lifting his
glass in toast. “Anyone into making wagers on the outcome of this charming
prediction?”

“Not me.” I was on to EG’s pessimistic prophesies. “She’s
already run a dossier on all Patra’s connections, and
useful
is a subjective judgment she gets to call.”

“Bill’s not a loser,” Patra said with irritation. “He’s a
geek who knows more than schools can teach him. He took this project and ran
with it on just the promise of payment.”

Speaking as an independent contractor and someone who would
have given her eyeteeth for a chance at college, I thought that spelled loser,
but again, the call was subjective. I’d wait and see what he produced.

“Let’s celebrate by going to the mall again,” EG demanded.

Nick didn’t look as interested as usual, to my relief. Weeks
at sea and he’d probably arranged a hot date for the evening. Patra was looking
at her watch. I hated disappointing the kid — this was a poor sort of
celebration — but I despised the mall.

Tentatively, I suggested, “What if we look at Macs on-line
and study what you need first?”

EG lit up like the Washington monument. “You mean it? You’ll
let me have my own computer? Can I have a Macbook?”

I’d known it was the Apple store she wanted at the mall.
Nick and Patra looked suitably impressed that I’d pushed the right buttons. And
then the hunky fiddle player strolled over, and the real celebration began.

A sumptuous repast and pitchers of ambrosia were consumed. Patra
swirled between tables, learning zydeco dancing from the appreciative staff. Nick
flirted with the wine steward.

A screech of tires and bloodcurdling scream abruptly blared
over the racket of the accordion. I looked up from letting EG admire the new
Mac desktop on my smartphone. We both glanced to the distant windows, but this
was the city. Accidents happened. No one else seemed disturbed, even when
sirens wailed. We went back to our own selfish concerns.

Not until the bill arrived, and Patra had returned to the
table, frowning that her contact hadn’t arrived as promised, did we notice the
police near the entrance. We hadn’t been among the diners placed on display in
the front window, so we weren’t of interest to the policeman currently
interviewing restaurant patrons seated there.

“Would your Bill have reason to dodge the cops?” I asked
uneasily as I signed off the meal on the family credit card. With our
experience, the cops outside seemed the most reasonable excuse for the no-show.

“None that I know of. Let me call him before we leave.” She
punched his name on her phone and wrapped a colorful Pashmina around her bare
shoulders, while watching the action on the street.

Other diners were starting to glance around, too. Cops
inside pricey D.C. restaurants are not common. The men in blue were being
circumspect, but the flashing lights outside had become obtrusive. An ambulance
screamed to a halt in the middle of the street, and I was glad we’d walked. A
D.C. traffic jam was a spectacle to behold.