Twisted Genius Page 4

  He didn’t sound happy to hear me, but I’d learned that Graham got grumpy when otherwise occupied. He saw the necessity of wiping Nadia’s files clean after he grabbed the contents though. While he did that, I went in search of laptops or other evidence.

  The children were weeping in what I guessed was the family room. My bet was that Anika didn’t understand half of what she was being told. It would take time for them to grasp the gaping hole in their existence. I could pray their mother would recover, but she had a long fight ahead if she did. Fighting my own demons, I fixed peanut butter and apples and left them on the counter, along with glasses of milk and Oreos.

  I didn’t find any laptops or tablets. I was afraid if Nadia had any—and tech geeks always did—they might have been in the car. I texted Nick my concern. I wasn’t certain what he could do, but I didn’t want to bother Graham again.

  Nick texted back that he would be over soon. And then he sent me a link to a video. I wanted to be gone before Nick needed the concealment of the garage, so I didn’t immediately follow the link. I hugged the teary-eyed kids goodbye and told Guy that Nick was on his way. He almost looked relieved, but then the complications hit him, and I could see his eyes glaze over. My brother is a good guy, but he isn’t exactly the nurturing sort.

  I told him I’d be in touch and left him that way. In the limo, I opened the video Nick had sent me.

  I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at, at first. It was just too weird. There was arch-fiend Rose pontificating from a grandstand, his fake tan glistening with sweat from the spotlight. I guessed from what I could see of the banners that it was a political rally in South Carolina. The camera panned over a crowd of mostly older people, burly truck drivers and balding men in baseball caps, ladies in gingham and denim and everything in between. They bounced red, white, and blue Rose political signs alongside of handwritten ones espousing conservative causes that made my socialist soul wince.

  That was all normal. What wasn’t normal was the eerie white balloons with painted faces rising from the floor and dropping from the ceiling, startling and distracting the audience from the speaker.

  And the really bizarre part? They all looked like a scary caricature of Harvey Scion, of Scion Pharmaceuticals—Rose’s campaign strategist and financial backer.

  I stopped the video and zoomed up. That was the drug lord’s distinctive V of bad hair implants receding across his balding dome painted on top of the balloons. He really did have an almost round head and a narrow jaw, so the balloons were perfect in that respect. The caricature made his eyes smaller and closer together and exaggerated the heavy bags under them. The nose resembled a snout more than the broken flat thing it was in reality. The thin lips were pinched, and his perpetual day-old beard completed the effect. It was a danged scary balloon.

  People dodged the strange orbs as if they might be bombs. And then the balloons started popping.

  Women screamed. Men pulled guns. Rose’s bodyguards dived for their fearless leader, shoving him down the stage steps and out of sight. He must be growing tired of these interruptions to his speechifying.

  I could swear, after that, men started shooting the balloons before they could pop—as if inflated rubbers were truly terrorists. Smarter people dived for cover. It was utter chaos—and made no sense in any world I knew.

  Except one, I realized in panic. Magda had a love of caricatures. She collected them—which meant she knew the names of the best caricaturists in the world.

  I called Nick to ask about the video link, but he was apparently already in his car, headed for Nadia’s house. He didn’t answer. I sent the link to Graham. He didn’t respond.

  Maybe my journalist sister Patra knew what the video was about.

  I’d been planning on calling her about Guy’s explosive allegations. The information needed to be made public if Nadia wasn’t to suffer in vain—although having Graham warn me last night that the file itself could be explosive, on top of Magda’s less specific threat, made me cautious. I hadn’t sent it yet.

  Magda had used Scion’s name and warned “they” had reached the end game, whatever in heck that meant. After years of being a doormat beneath my mother’s feet, I tended to rebel against anything she said. I decided it was unfair for me to treat Patra in the same way that made me resent my mother.

  Patra was young, but she was smart. And she was living with Sean O’Herlihy, an experienced investigative reporter for the Times. I couldn’t trust the material in the hands of two better people.

  I hit Patra’s number and only got voice mail. Rats. I hung up and pondered whether or not to expose her to the same danger as Nick was in.

  From what little I’d read, Nadia and Guy’s report focused on tedious data that proved price fixing and profit mongering in the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry. But buried in it was an exposé of Scion’s sprawling pharmaceutical firms, revealing them as the fraudulent blood-suckers they were.

  Scion was Rose’s closest political confidant, a man certain to be appointed to the White House should Rose win, a man who was providing funds to ensure that Rose won. Power and greed made for a ruthless combination, and the Top Hat cabal supporting Rose had proved the extent of their determination.

  I’d lived under corrupt foreign governments. Once tyrants claimed power, there was no stopping their depredations because bullies had no conscience. Rose with a drug lord steering him could not possibly be good for any country.

  The fate of the nation was my justification for leaving voice mail for Patra, then shooting Nadia’s hot potato to Patra’s mailbox.

  Information just wants to be free and all that.

  The security camera over the mansion’s front door told Graham when Ana returned. She normally strode through the house like a general off to war—a true disturbance in the force. For the introvert she claimed to be, his black-braided genie knew how to make herself known.

  It had irritated him at first, then amused him. Now. . . he was stupidly admiring her attitude and achievements and sitting here anticipating her return, as he’d told himself he’d never do again.

  She was slight, but she trudged up the stairs as if carrying the weight of the world, so he knew she was weary. Since she’d covered up all the cameras that invaded her privacy, he could only see her on the landing. After that, he had to assume she went to her room for a shower and sleep.

  He’d been on contentious terms with sleep for years, but he relaxed now that Ana was safe in this fortress her grandfather had built.

  He played the video of the balloons Ana had sent him on one monitor, the pie-flinging episode on another, and tracked Rose’s campaign schedule on a third. Then he opened up files on Ana’s mother and Harvey Scion and began tapping his keyboard.

  The hacker interference last night had slowed down his search, but his resources were far and wide. With any luck at all, he’d soon have the recent itineraries of all the parties involved.

  He doubted Ana would appreciate what he suspected he’d find. He just hoped it would distract her from the grenade he’d tossed to her last night, until he’d found the terrorists who wanted it.

  Chapter 5

  After a long nap and a shower, I dressed and jogged down to my basement office to check my incoming. I opened Nick’s text first. FOUND NADIA’S CAR. NO LAPTOP. CLAIM COP REMOVED CONTENTS.

  I have a suspicious mind. I didn’t believe a cop searched the contents of a car towed after an accident. They didn’t have time for that, unless there was reason to believe a crime had been committed.

  I’m a virtual research assistant by trade, not a detective. I have a wide field of resources but no technical training to investigate bomb splatter or accident scenes. I left that to the professionals. I can often provide the missing pieces officialdom needs to solve an investigation, but generally, the cops didn’t appreciate my aid. TV detectives have it so much easier. My script writer is worthless like that.

  So hunting for whoever tried to take out my brother an
d Guy by examining an exploded garage was an impossible hurdle. The coincidence of Nadia’s accident was not.

  Graham’s security network was so vast that if I dug deep enough, I could access files inside computers that shouldn’t have back doors but do. Not my fault if they leave them improperly guarded.

  Nadia’s name got me into the accident report database. As I suspected, no detective had been assigned to clear out her car. The contents supposedly awaited a family member to collect them.

  If I needed proof of skullduggery, a fake cop collecting family possessions was sufficient for me. I didn’t have the facilities for finding a hit-and-run driver. The police would make standard inquiries for videos and match car parts, but a trained assassin would have that covered. The cops weren’t thinking in terms of a killer. I was.

  I texted my cyber-genius half-brother Tudor and asked if he could trace the location of the laptop using Nadia’s e-mail and other information from her computer. He’s A-level in a Brit public school, buried in work and play, so I didn’t expect an immediate answer.

  I opened an e-mail from Zander, the male half of my twin siblings. He had returned to South Africa to persuade his brokerage firm to give him a position in the DC branch with our family money as his starting point. He’s really young but exceptionally smart, and I wasn’t surprised that he reported he would be returning soon to start sorting our new-found wealth.

  After a lifetime of near-homeless poverty, I wasn’t entirely certain how I felt about my grandfather’s millions. I feared they’d been acquired in ways I wouldn’t approve, but he also meant the money to take care of his family. That part, I could appreciate. Ambivalence-is-me, and I didn’t get to be dictator. Money decisions belonged to everyone.

  Out of wicked curiosity, I asked Zander if he had any way of tracing Harvey Scion’s investments. Yeah, I knew financial records were supposed to be confidential, but they never were. I tapped whatever resources were available, and it would be faster if Zander dug than if I had to. He’d learned the dangers of too much money in the hands of the wrong people when he’d been here last. He knew how to dig deep to find what we needed. He would have copied my resources, and he was better at interpreting financial statements than I was.

  Since I had no reply from Patra, I went online to read more about the Scion/Rose balloon incident. The left-wing media was positively gleeful about the gun-toting Rose supporters shooting each other up, but no one could explain how painted balloons had suddenly bounced all over the school gym where the rally had been held. Or why.

  The articles were amusing but didn’t help in finding connections to Nadia’s murder attempt, even if the balloons looked like her boss. The report she and Guy had written on Scion Pharmaceutical was my biggest lead—unless her abusive husband had knocked her off. Just in case, I sent off a few inquiries to determine his name and location, but it was likely he’d show up to claim the kids and insurance if he was involved.

  Balloon caricatures and exploding garages and hit-and-run assassins didn’t necessarily connect. I just didn’t like the coincidence. If the cops did the footwork and covered their bases, I would do my best to find connections behind the scenes.

  While I pondered the best approach to finding a hit-and-run driver, I poked through more unofficial backdoors to see what was being done about the garage bombing. Explosives had been found, so they had real detectives on the case, not to mention the FBI and the KGB for all I knew. So Guy could be right—the bad guys were after him as well as Nadia.

  Of course, it could be terrorists, but even the most stupid terrorist has better places to blow up than a parking garage—unless they had a specific target.

  I didn’t dare dig too far if the FBI was paying attention, so I just scanned the police file and slipped out again. Hacking the FBI wasn’t happening. I’d leave that up to Graham.

  But my snarky thought about the KGB churned up a memory about Scion Pharmaceuticals. I rummaged around on normal search engines until I had a small file of business articles about Scion expanding the manufacture of their popular pain-killing drug, Mylaudanix, to Eastern Europe. The business news was more excited about expanding markets than in the patients or the drug itself.

  But now I remembered Mylaudanix being in the news recently, so I rummaged some more. Research wasn’t as exciting as running bomb-sniffing dogs through a burned-out garage. It was tedious and time-consuming, and I was starving since I’d missed breakfast and lunch. Did I really care if thousands of people were hooked on pain-killers? People since the beginning of time have done drugs and alcohol for reasons unfathomable to me. I need my brain sharp and in control. Others apparently don’t.

  The front door over my basement office slammed.

  The intercom spoke at the same time. “Guess who’s coming to dinner?”

  Once upon a time I used to fling the speaker across the room when Graham did that. Now I stupidly thrilled at his deep chocolate voice. Maybe he felt safer with mechanical communication, except I knew he wasn’t waiting for a reply. I also guessed who the door slammer was. I’d been half-waiting for this since yesterday. Time for a break.

  I jogged up the stairs to confront EG before she disappeared into the black hole that was her Gothic tower room. “I thought you were spending the weekend with your father.”

  “Helloise had a headache.” EG is pretty much a shorter version of me—long black hair, short, slender, with our mother’s elongated, long-lashed green eyes. She narrowed those deadly eyes now. “We were supposed to see Beauty and the Beast in 3-D. It’s a dumb movie, but I wanted to see how the glasses worked.”

  Helloise was not her half-sister’s name—it was EG’s opinion of the ten-year-old brat whose real name was Eloise. Before he ran for the Senate, EG’s father had separated from Eloise’s mother and took up with Magda in some resort in Spain. I tried not to understand our mother’s intentions, but I suspected she was not beneath wielding influence over a wealthy man on the brink of political power.

  Whatever, Senator Tex headed back home to make nice with his family, abandoning EG to my youthful, resentful care. When EG had showed up at my door last year—all by herself—I’d gathered my rage and headed straight for DC and her father. Parents ought to be responsible for the offspring they flung into the world.

  Except some people just weren’t cut out to be parents.

  I followed in her stomping path across the foyer to the impressive staircase that adorned our Victorian mansion. “Couldn’t Tex take you to see the movie?”

  “Mrs. Tex was supposed to take us, but now she’s nursing her poor achy baby. Tex is busy taking calls about drugs,” she said sourly.

  Drugs? But my sister’s disappointment came before research. Tex had left EG hanging like an unwanted extra appendage. “And what did you do to give Eloise a headache?” I knew my sister too well to sympathize totally.

  She snickered, looking a little less disgruntled. “It was almost worth missing the movie. I told her about the billions of bugs living in her fancy princess bed, then showed her pictures on the computer when she didn’t believe me. She had a screaming fit and demanded a new mattress and all new princess pink frou-frou to go with it.”

  That was the Evil Genius I knew and loved. “I shouldn’t reward you for meanness, but pink frou-frou was obviously irresistible,” I admitted. “I’ll take you to the movie. Find the nearest theater. Just give me time to eat.”

  I wanted to know more about the Senator and those drug calls that were keeping him busy, but I wasn’t grilling EG about her father. I despised Tex and his backward thinking, but he’s her dad.

  At my promise, she perked up and pulled out her phone. I know she wanted to be with her new-found father, but she would learn the same way I had—family are the people who love and nurture you, not necessarily the people who brought you into the world.

  “There’s a showing at four, on the other side of the Circle,” she cried triumphantly as I trotted for the stairs to tackle the basement kitchen.<
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  “Put on your princess costume,” I called back. And then, just because I knew he was listening, I texted Graham: DOES THE BEAST WANT TO GO TO THE MOVIES?

  NOT NOW was his only reply.

  Given his hermit nature and our prior relationship, I actually considered this a positive sign.

  “You do know Beauty is not a princess?” Mallard said as I invaded his kitchen.

  Mallard was the epitome of a perfect butler, starched shirt and all. But he was once a revolutionary general in Ireland and probably a spy, so I never underestimated his ability to starve us to death if we didn’t step in line.

  “I will catch up on my fairy tales in my next life,” I informed him. My education had been in the school of hard knocks and not in libraries.

  I would have reached for the massive refrigerator door, but he handed me a plate with a wheat bagel loaded with eggs and goodies, plus a fresh cup of my favorite tea. I guessed that meant taking EG to the movies met with his approval. He normally scowled when I entered his private domain.

  “Scion Pharmaceutical has its headquarters in Ireland,” he intoned solemnly. “It employs hundreds of people who would otherwise have no jobs.”

  “So do weapon manufacturers,” I agreed between mouthfuls. “That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be making aspirin and toys instead.”

  “They have stockholders to pay.”

  I knew the old revolutionary was merely playing devil’s advocate. Yeah, he loved guns as much as any military man, but guns and drugs disseminated like candy on street corners were death to civilization as we knew it. “They have gluttonous CEOs to pay,” I countered.

  “Your grandfather was once one of them,” he reminded me.

  “Yeah, and Max paid with his life. So don’t tell me not to cut the greedmeisters where it hurts, and I won’t tell you how to make coq au vin.”