Chapter One
IT WASpast midnight when the small fleet of black vans bumped over the tire shredders and pulled up to the security booth. The bored security guard glanced up, back down at his graphic novel, and waved them through.
Syntech was Dyno-clean’s biggest company, so they scheduled them in for a double-shift booking at the end of the night. Twice a month they doubled up the crew to make sure everything was spit polished and shipshape. It was as tightly organized as a military campaign.
Down in the parking garage, Jacob hopped out of the back of the van. He yawned until his jaw cracked, blinked back tears, and stretched his arms to work the kinks out of his spine. They’d been working eight hours already—four office buildings and the renovated dorm at the university—and the smell of disinfectant felt like it had soaked into his pores.
It had worn on the rest of the cleaning crew as well, especially with Jacob doing his bit to stir up existing tensions. So far there had been one accusation of sexism, a fight bad enough that the two cleaners couldn’t be assigned the same floor, and everyone was quietly resentful toward the student who’d been caught reading his textbook instead of working. It had been two jobs since anyone had said a casual word or cracked a joke.
“Jacob!” the crew supervisor snapped, crooking a finger at him. He sauntered over, and she shoved a work order against his chest with stiff fingers. “You’re doing the floors on the executive levels. Do a good job this time. You’re still on a warning after what happened at the university last month, and if your next performance review doesn’t improve….”
“I remember. I’m out of a job,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be on the top of my game tonight.”
She squinted at him dourly, but he gave her his best trustworthy look. After a second she hmphed and stepped backward.
“I’m keeping my eye on you,” she said. “Now get back to work.”
He hummed contentedly to himself as he did what he was told. Everything was going according to plan.
THE HUMMINGhad turned into a tuneless whistle as Jacob stepped off the lift, dragging the buffer with him. He unwound the cord, snapped it to make it snake over the floor, and plugged it in next to one of the sullenly growing potted plants. The buffer juddered to life and skidded over the floor. He grabbed it by one hand and dragged it down the hall behind him, letting it swing carelessly back and forth over the floor. As he walked he bit the coating of glue and paint from his hand. The peeled-off strips of it went into his pocket.
The top floors were usually Naya’s realm. She was presentable and polite, in case anyone was working late and she ran into them. And she spent all her time daydreaming about her wedding, so she didn’t mind the boring jobs. The last few weeks, though, Jacob had noticed her creaming her hands every time she got into the van. Not with the cheap, greasy stuff the rest of them used either. Something from a department store.
She wanted nice hands for the big day. Not the raw, peeling mess of contact dermatitis she saw every time Jacob peeled his gloves off.
Jacob dropped the buffer off outside Nora Clayton’s office and kept walking. He unzipped the top of his boiler suit, squirmed out of it, and let the sleeves dangle. It had been a while since he’d had to actually work on-site, but luckily it looked like he hadn’t become any less of an asshole.
His brain ticked through how long his manipulation of the cleaning crew’s various resentments and tensions would buy him before someone came to check on how he was doing up here. Gun would be slacking, trying to steal five minutes to read his textbook, Anna would be crying in the toilet, and Jim would be trying to run interference with Ella. Add twenty minutes to the hour it usually took Ella to get up there and subtract ten because she didn’t trust Jacob to do a good job.
He pulled his T-shirt up and untaped the stripped-down electronics from his stomach. Plenty of time for what he needed to do.
Something jabbed at the back of his brain—a nasty little squirm of doubt that he couldn’t quite pin down. He hastily flipped through the plan in his head to see if he’d missed anything. It seemed solid, but that bastard qualm kept squirming. With nothing to pin it on, he squelched the thought and loped down the tiled floor to the president’s office.
The door wasn’t locked, which was sweet. It was cold inside and the heat that built over the day had leeched out through the span of glass that took up the external wall.
Jacob let himself in, nudged the door shut behind him, and headed to the desk. It was slick, polished glass, and the keyboard flickered to life in squares of light on the surface as he touched it. Folding one leg under him as he sat down, his heel pressing against the back of his knee, he strung the code breaker together with confident fingers.
He couldn’t make one himself—social programming was his specialty—but he understood how they worked. Once it was hooked up, the touchpad flickered dimly to life. He reached under the desk and plugged it into the hard drive.
While it worked he sat back in the chair. The leather settled under him as he chewed absently at the skin around his thumb. He’d had to get himself an honest job because security at Syntech was good enough to have plugged his usual sources of information—the careless e-mails, the social network logins, the chatty tech in the coffee queue.
If the computer security was that watertight….
He took a deep breath that tasted of ozone and Amouage and swiveled the chair around to face the glass. There were marks that shouldn’t be on that sort of conspicuous display of prestige—linen-weft smudges and a few smears of hair gel stickiness where Porter had forgotten it wasn’t the sort of wall you leaned against.
If gut instinct had been enough, Jacob would have been out of work a month before. Porter was cutthroat, but he didn’t play games, and industrial espionage was all about games. Besides, Porter was arrogant. He listened to maybe two people in the company. Not the sort who’d admit they needed to steal someone else’s idea.
Jacob stretched his legs out in front of him and watched the reflection of his sneakers move in the glass. Or he was wrong and Porter was a thief. Either way Jacob got paid.
It was Christmas out there in the dark. Jacob could see the red and green glitter of lights strung in the street and bright in the windows of office buildings. The feeling in the back of his brain poked at him again, but he shoved it down firmly and bit through the tag of skin he’d been worrying. The copper tang of blood was sharp against his tongue, and he pulled a face.
Bad old habit. He thought he’d broken it years ago.
The stop clock in his head ticked down the minutes as he waited. He wasn’t at the panic point, but he was just about to start fidgeting when the code breaker hiccupped behind him. He dug his heel into the carpet and swung around, and his mouth quirked with satisfaction as the narrow monitor flickered to life.
“There you go,” he said approvingly. He laced his fingers together and bent them back to pop his knuckles—another bad habit, but not one he’d ever bothered to try to break. He tapped quickly on the glass, and his knuckles broke the beams of light as he typed in commands. “Now let’s see what we’ve got.”
On the floors below, thirty-two machines obediently allowed Porter’s computer to access their hard drives and the thirty-two trojans that Jacob had spent the last two months installing handed over the data they’d mined. The packets streamed onto Porter’s computer and immediately bounced to Jacob’s private server as the percentage bars flickered over the screen.
