Undercover Genius Read Online Free

is
prepared to support the general’s request to escalate,” an unaccented,
arrogant American baritone said.
    “ The weapons lobby
backing you?” a cynical, less grammatically constrained American voice
asked . “Or the oil industry? Or both?”
    “Unless we want
terrorists controlling the world’s oil supply, my request for escalation is the
only solution,” a crisp, commanding voice said. “But the media will raise hell unless we have all our ducks in line.”
    A bored Brit drawl intruded. “The Arabic station is ours. We can feed a propaganda frenzy whenever
it’s needed. Just be certain all your pawns are in place, because once the
rioting starts, there will be no stopping civil war.”
    The arrogant American responded. “ We’ve acquired newspapers in France, Greece, and Germany. These things
take time — and caution. The American media will take longer to convince,
but we have officials in place who can pull the right strings, and our own
mouthpieces to start the shouting. We’ll be ready.”
    “Freedom of the press
isn’t all it’s cracked up to be over the pond, is it?” the Brit asked
mockingly.
    “Everything can be
bought for a price. But there are still a few obstacles,” the authoritative
one said. “ That’s what I brought you here
to talk about. You have a wild card in your deck who needs to be dealt with.
He’s been snooping where he shouldn’t — ”
    * * *
    The voices on the CD quit speaking after a knocking sound
in the background. I reached over and ejected the disk.
    “A general is
talking about manipulating governments and bringing down a foreign regime
through propaganda and the media !”
Patra said in indignation. “They’ve bought the media — TV stations,
newspapers, radio! Just to keep oil companies and weapons manufacturers afloat.
Millions of people died for their greed! I think this reflects part of the
conspiracy my father was writing about. If Dad taped this, and anyone learned
about it, they may have had him killed. I need to hire someone with voice
recognition software.”
    Danger, Will Robinson was
the first idiocy leaping to my mind.
    I didn’t need any more conspiracies on my plate. Rich politicians
monopolizing the textbook industry had nearly cost me EG and had almost
certainly ended our grandfather’s life. Greedmeisters buying up international
media to put their own puppets into place — probably in oil rich countries —
was business as usual as far as I was concerned.
    So I rolled my eyes at Patra’s suggestion. “You want the
kind of fancy software they have on woo-woo shows where the cops compare voice
patterns to identify the baddies? Not happening, babe. No database.”
    “They can do a spectro-analysis of the voices in that file. All
we need to do is provide recordings of potential suspects for comparison. Once
we find matches, we can positively identify the speakers through science,” she
said stubbornly. “I sent a copy of that file to an analyst recommended by a
friend of mine, and he’s pretty excited about it. He thinks I’m on to
something.”
    “But the analyst needs money for the analysis,” I finished
for her, beginning to see the light.
    “Yeah, but all the men I want to record are here in D.C,”
she said with more excitement. “We can do this, Ana. We can prove some pretty
powerful men are manipulating the media for their own immoral purposes, and
they killed my dad to cover up his findings!”
    Ah, the innocence of youth. Did I have any right to burst her
bubble with my apathetic cynicism? I gave up fighting for causes long ago —
probably before I was EG’s age, since my father had been killed when I was
four. Survival was the name of my game.
    Except I was learning that family was why we needed to
survive, and I knew her pain. “How much?” I asked in resignation.
    She named a sum that left me sputtering and glad EG had a
scholarship to her private school.
    As reluctant as I was to do it, for the kid’s sake, I