Read Online Cyber Genius by Patricia Rice - Free Book Online

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.

Six
    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