Read Online Cyber Genius by Patricia Rice - Free Book Online Page A

fast to be
certain. How could anyone watch all those screens at once? ADD much?
    And then Tudor spotted the Twitter screen following the #cookiemonster
tag. His stomach sank to his shoes.
    “Would you like to explain the software that allowed you to
breach the government’s visa website?” the hulk in the chair asked without greeting.
    Tudor had the weird feeling the man had eyes in the back of
his head.
    “The worm was only supposed to remove my footprint,” Tudor
replied defensively, glaring at the incriminating evidence on the screen. “No
one has the right to keep track of all my information.”
    “There is no law that says they can’t track anyone who enters their website,” Graham pointed out.
“Quid pro quo, you want their information, you have to give them yours. You
don’t want their information, stay off their website.”
    “I didn’t mean to
use it on the visa site,” Tudor said defensively. “I just forgot to turn the
program off. But the worm was programmed to only eat my information. It should never have gone past the data folder.”
Tudor took a deep breath and asked his greatest fear, “Did it gut anything
vital?”
    “Besides national security?” Graham asked dryly. “No, it
seems to have been content with destroying only the data level where user
information is stored. One hopes that was backed up elsewhere and that they
shut down before the worm could attach itself to other documents. Just the fact
that you breached the State Department’s firewalls is chilling enough.”
    Thankfully, the room was too dark for anyone to tell he’d
been sweating. Tudor swallowed a lump of relief. “But someone with real spyware
could have gone in through that hole and stolen all the info, right? That’s
what I told Stiles.”
    Graham dialed up a screen showing Stiles’ personal email
account, the one Tudor had turned up from his hacker buddies. He opened up
Tudor’s coded email. It looked pretty pathetic up there on the wall.
    “Stiles is dead,” Graham said bluntly. “He died soon after
he had the software tested and found the holes in the websites you told him
about. He found more.”
    Tudor grokked that Ana thought Stiles had been murdered because of the spyhole. The
stories he’d read had said food poisoning. He didn’t think he was important
enough to have been personally responsible for the death of his hero, but he
would gladly take down anyone who might have done it. He asked warily, “And
what do you want me to do?”
    “Go to MIT, get out of our hair, don’t show your face here
again,” Graham said. “But what I want and what I need aren’t necessarily the
same, as your sister has so crudely pointed out.”
    “Yes, sir,” Tudor said with caution, not entirely
understanding. “I don’t have the funds to visit MIT. Does that mean it’s safe
for me to go home? I can ask Ana for a loan.”
    “No, it’s not safe
for you to go home, not with your fine hand all over that Twitter account.” He
gestured at the screen before working some magic with his keyboard and making
all the messages disappear, leaving the Twitter screen blank.
    Tudor watched in awe as Graham ran a search on the tag he’d
just deleted and nothing showed up. He’d wiped the tag clean from the public Twitter database. How was that even possible? Well,
it wasn’t, entirely, but the copies would be buried so deep in such obscure
places, someone would really have to know what they were doing to find them.
    As if he hadn’t just performed magic, Graham continued, “I
would recommend eliminating all your social media accounts and lying low,
preferably forever. A mind like yours is a frightening thing.”
    “Yes, sir.” Tudor wasn’t certain where this was going. His
people skills often failed him. “Ana told me not to use your network, though.
Should I go to a library?”
    Graham kneaded his forehead before speaking. “No, you cannot
leave the house until we find who killed Stiles and why. That person