Chapter 3

Upstairs, I gave Zander the Lincoln bedroom. He studied the immense antique sleigh bed and mahogany mantel, while I lifted the oil painting of Lincoln and plastered duct tape over the camera lens beneath it.

“Respect privacy,” I told the floor lamp as I reached beneath the shade and ripped out the bug.

Alexander blinked in surprise when I handed it to him. “We do not need the security device?”

Security device! I almost heard Graham howl in laughter. Except Graham never howled at anything.

“If you feel safer having the spy in the attic listen to your every move, then reinstall it. But this is America. We don’t spy on our own citizens.” Which was a lie these days, but I didn’t want to argue details when he looked on the brink of exhaustion.

That he accepted bugs as a security device said a great deal of the climate of violence he’d grown up in.

“Thank you,” was all Zander said as he took the battery out of the bug.

He was a foot taller than me, so I resisted the urge to give him an encouraging hug. I couldn’t give him comforting words either, because all my experience said Juliana was dead or in dire trouble if she had quit communicating. I didn’t make promises I couldn’t keep.

I left him unpacking, and gut roiling, hurried to my basement hideaway. EG would be home from school shortly. After a few harrowing episodes, we’d agreed to let Graham’s limo service take her to and from school. I feared we were losing our independence and survival instincts by living in luxury. It was a dilemma my mother would appreciate—security or independence? Paranoia versus freedom? It’s a choice we all make.

Magda had run away from this comfortable life when I was just a toddler, after my father died in a bomb attack, along with Graham’s father and a few other rebellious young men. As a result, I’d grown up surviving on wits, bravado, and any martial arts I could learn on the run. I’d seen the results of bullets too many time to appreciate guns, so I declined their use. I’d rather die than do that to another human being.

I wanted EG to grow up in a world of peace where she didn’t have to make that choice.

Telling myself I could still teach her survival, I plugged the thumb drive into the Cobalt Whiz, the state-of-the-art computer Graham had provided, and went to work.

Graham was far more than a security consultant. He’d once been an aide to the President of the United States, and he still maintained high level security contacts. I wasn’t entirely certain they all knew who he was since he’d dropped off the grid after 9/11, but I made use of every resource at hand without questioning.

As I worked, Graham dropped files about JACAD into my computer. That pretty much meant that CAD was already on his hit list of suspicious organizations. We both had a vendetta going for Top Hat, a secretive cabal of tycoons that I blamed for killing Max. They were politically-connected, wealthy men with a right-wing agenda. I didn’t like the idea that he suspected Juliana’s employer to be involved with treacherous men who controlled financial institutions, oil companies, and the media.

But it was best to know what I was up against if Juliana might have disappeared on JACAD’s watch. I skimmed through the files on the development’s philanthropic goals—building schools wasn’t their only project. Funded by gun lobbies, Christian groups, and a few purely political PACs, CAD had acquired some very pricey land across the river in Virginia.

I almost poked my eyes out when I saw the architectural renderings of the planned project. Not low rent housing for the needy, no sirree. They were building a Christian amusement park. If I was making any sense out of these images, the park came complete with the disciples riding around on dinosaurs, and Jesus emerging from an Aladdin’s cave paved in gold. I closed the document and wished I could purge my brain and unsee that.

My parents were Catholic—in all senses of the word. I’d attended synagogues and mosques and soaring cathedrals and fully respected those who believed in their faith.

I did not, however, appreciate brainwashing. I’d seen the attempts to remove science and historical accuracy from EG’s textbooks in favor of Biblical beliefs. I knew the Top Hat cabal was behind a narrow-minded conspiracy to suppress free-thinking. Their clique hadn’t—yet—reached the demonic efforts of the Chinese to control opinion by snuffing those who questioned authority, but once Senator Rose, their candidate for presidency, was in office, I could see that as a very real possibility.

I couldn’t grasp the unquestioning absurdity behind those dinosaurs. All they needed was a world-is-flat exhibit with the United States drawn as the only country on the planet. That really would make the rest of the world aliens, wouldn’t it? I tried to laugh, but I was too worried about my sister.

As I drilled down through CAD’s donors, my mouth grew dry. Every dangerous Top Hat fat cat I knew had contributed exceedingly large sums for the development of Joshua’s berserk Jesus World.

What the. . . dickens. . . had Juliana got herself into? These men were not philanthropists, although I suppose they might donate if they thought Joshua would shape the world in their white male image. But even in my cynicism, I couldn’t believe they swayed that way.

I pulled myself away from my awful fascination with the cabal’s scurvy machinations and returned to searching for Juliana’s phone numbers, bank accounts, and credit cards.

Alexander was undoubtedly too proper to hack his sister’s accounts. I wasn’t. She hadn’t even set up on-line access. I thoughtfully did it for her, copying passwords she’d stored from other applications.

Her salary and allowance were still being deposited into her bank account. That was a relief of sorts. Surely CAD wouldn’t keep paying her stipends unless she was showing up for work, right? But why would she drop out of her family’s sight?

She’d had a field day at a photographic equipment shop when she’d first arrived in early September. The payments on her credit card balance from that spree had been automatically transferred from her bank in the months since. The only other withdrawal was nearly the balance of her account at the beginning of November.

Phone and cash made her the target of every mugger in DC.

EG clattered down the stairs. Nerves on edge, I almost jumped from my chair.

“Who’s in the Lincoln room?” she asked as she burst in. “Did Magda come for Christmas?”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Did you invite her?”

Blithely uncaring of my long-term feud with our mother, she settled into one of my wing chairs. “She said she might come. Tudor and everyone will be here. It will be the first time we’ve all been together since—”

“Since never,” I filled in for her. “They’re still bombing people in Iraq, and she wants to come home?” This was said in heavy irony. Magda always ended up in war zones, although Iraq was presumably being decommissioned.

“I know. Isn’t it rad?” she asked excitedly, missing my sarcasm. “But shouldn’t she have Max’s room?”

“Probably, if she were here, which she isn’t.” Max had died in a bed on the ground floor, just above my basement office. With illness, he hadn’t been able to climb the stairs, so he’d had an old parlor renovated into a massive suite containing everything a man could want, including bolt holes to my basement office and secret stairs to the attic for Graham to use. I hated the idea of having Magda staying overhead.

EG glared at me expectantly. She really is too smart for her own good.

“One of the South African twins is here—Alexander,” I told her.

“Cool! Does he play video games?”

One good thing about living life out of a suitcase, one learned to expect surprises and make do with what one was given.

“I have no idea, and don’t wake him up to ask. How did your English test go?”

She gave a heavy sigh of exasperation. “I wrote an essay comparing the spy cases of the Rosenbergs and Pollard and all she did was correct my commas. I think commas ought to be outlawed.”

I muffled a snort of laughter, appreciating the teacher’s dilemma at being handed a college-level political essay instead of the few paragraphs on pets she’d probably expected. “Tell Mallard to give you some of his molasses cookies and some hot chocolate as a reward. The cookies are heaven.”

She made a face but jumped up, ready to experiment with molasses. “We only have room for one more person. Will Juliana be joining us?”

Snoop. She didn’t know the twins, had no reason to even know of their existence—except she snooped, just like Magda. And me. I’d have to check her computer to find out what files she’d accessed.

“We don’t know yet.” I wasn’t letting her know there was a mystery at hand or she’d don a Sherlock Holmes hat and be off to find our missing sister.

I didn’t want to tell her that the sister she’d never known might be dead.

Nick didn’t show up until after dinner. I’d texted him about Zander’s arrival and that we had a problem, but I didn’t want to put too much out there. And none of us wanted to discuss Juliana in front of EG, so he waited until he knew she’d be in bed.

Nicholas Maximillian is a brilliant mathematician, card shark, and diplomat. Like many of our nomadic family, he has dual citizenship. He’s the illegitimate son of a British lord, who made sure his son had the education I didn’t have. Nick is male model gorgeous: tall, blond, has a firm square jaw with cleft in it, and sharp Slavic cheekbones. I have the same cheekbones, and so does Magda, so there’s probably some truth to her claim to being Hungarian. She’s about as much a princess as any rich Jewish girl, though. Nick also happens to be gay, although in his diplomat’s finery, only the bright blue ascot gave him away.

Zander studied him thoughtfully, shook hands, and slumped into the Morris chair without saying a word.

“Takes after Max, does he?” Nick asked with a grin, settling beside me on the horsehair sofa and sprawling his long legs on what was probably a ten-thousand-dollar antique coffee table. “Magda always said her father could out stonewall a stone wall.”

While Alexander attempted to puzzle that out, I plopped a paper file folder on Nick’s lap. I loved computers. They’re my lifeline to the world and I knew how to safeguard them. But Nick worked for the British embassy and was only vaguely aware of the concept of encryption, so I had to communicate with him by paper. All embassies come equipped with spies, and I prefer to keep our private life just that—private.

“Julie is still receiving her paychecks,” I told them, giving them the good news first. I wasn’t certain I wanted to involve Alexander in my conspiracy theories, so I didn’t mention my real concerns. “I want to experiment with the assumption that she thinks her phone and computer are tapped or otherwise watched, and she’s keeping a low profile.”

Zander’s head popped up with interest. “She’s protecting us as Magda protected us? By staying out of our lives? That’s bosbefok.”

I lifted my eyebrows and waited expectantly. He dropped his head in his hands again. “Juliana is very, very smart, but not always logical,” he admitted.

“Protecting family is perfectly logical,” Nick said with diplomatic tact. “If she knows this address, then she knows she can come here if she’s in any danger. That would indicate that she’s safe but unwilling to involve us. We need to give her a secure means of communication.”

That was a pretty huge leap of confidence, but it made Zander come to life.

“Can you find out if she still has her phone?” he asked eagerly. “I could text her with coordinates and leave a message for her in a cache near where she lives.”

“Assuming she still has her phone, if she recognizes your number, will she respond? If she’s protecting you, maybe not,” Nick warned.

“He could use one of our phones, but would she pay attention to us?” I asked, trying to put myself in her position—which was impossible, of course.

“We have a code,” Zander explained. “Once we have a cache set up, I’ll text her with just the coordinates. I can do it from an unknown number, but if I make the subject header a Bible phrase, she’ll know it’s me. If she gets it,” he added, gloom descending again.

A Bible phrase, of course. I really would have to wrap my head around having a pair of religious siblings. “We’ll go out tomorrow and you can show me what we need for a cache. The address she’s using is over in Alexandria. It’s not exactly a forest where you can bury things, unless it’s in someone’s front yard.”

“Caches can be creative. We’ll find something,” he said with assurance.

“Leave her a burner phone in the cache,” Nick advised. “They’re pretty much untraceable. We’ll put our number in it. Maybe she can text us that way.”

Provided she was alive. We could assume she hadn’t been abducted since there had been no ransom note.

If anyone realized we were actually worth a fortune, then every one of us would be a prime target for kidnapping. I wanted to bury my face in my hands, but I kept a positive expression and nodded approvingly as they made plans with almost no hope of success.