He heard a door creak as Dev padded out of his room and down the hall. “Look, Simon, I’ll talk to Harry or get the lawyers to talk to his lawyers. The last thing the board wants is the publicity of a criminal trial. If you can get my data back from Jacob….”
“Another party has gotten involved. And Harry’s dead. Maybe.”
Silence for long enough that Simon felt a tweak of worry he’d been disconnected. Then Dev huffed out a shocked “fuck” and Simon heard the clink of glass on glass and something being poured. Bourbon probably. Dev liked his bourbon.
Simon rubbed the heel of his hand over his eye. He could do with a drink. “I said it had gotten complicated.”
“Do I need to call you a lawyer?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Not clear yet,” Simon said. “Jacob claims that he met with Clayton to deliver the payload, they both got grabbed during the transfer, and he managed to get away at some point.”
“Do you believe him?”
Simon made an unenthusiastic noise. “I do, but then I did before too. Look. I don’t know what’s going on yet, but if someone is grabbing geniuses with a connection to this data….”
“I can take care of myself—”
“In a brawl, sure. But these guys were professionals. And you don’t just have yourself to think about, remember?” Simon finished the cigarette, tossed it onto the tarmac, and ground it out under his sole. “There’s a guy I served with, he does close protection now. I’m going to give him a call, and you’re going to hire him.”
“You’re overreacting.” Dev’s voice was a growl of offended pride.
Simon got up off the car, and the suspension creaked quietly as amusement quirked the corner of his mouth. “He’s good. He’s an asshole, but he’s good.”
“Great. Then he’s not going to miss my business.”
Stubborn bastard. Simon sighed and gave up, for the moment.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Simon said. “By then I should have a better idea what’s going on.”
“Maybe you should call the cops,” Dev said. “If Harry’s reallydead, this is out of our league.”
Not entirely true. Until he’d been invalided out, dead people had been Simon’s stock in trade. Mostly he’d dealt with making them that way, of course, rather than the cleanup afterward. Addiction tickled at the back of his brain, and the nicotine of five seconds past was of absolutely no comfort to craving neurons.
“We don’t even know if Jacob is telling the truth about Clayton yet,” Simon said. “If he is, cops would be more of a hindrance than a help. They don’t have the operating parameters for something like this, and even if they did…. Let’s be real, Dev. If I didn’t know we hadn’t done this? I’d think we had.”
“Flattering,” Dev said. “Fine. I’ll hold off for now.”
Guilt caught in the back of Simon’s throat. He owed Dev, and he wasn’t sure if he was acting solely in Syntech’s interests. There was also the lure of adrenaline’s uncomplicated hit… and Jacob. Jacob would end up in jail if they went to the police—for the theft of intellectual property if nothing else. And even if the little shit deserved it, Simon couldn’tquitestomach the idea.
“Thanks.”
Simon hung up, fired off a message to his security team—he didn’t need Dev’s permission to put them on high alert about the CEO’s safety—headed back into the hotel, and grabbed a coffee on the way past the front desk. It was only when the elevator let him back out on his floor that two things occurred to him. First, that neither he nor Dev had even suggested calling Clayton’s family, and second, that he didn’t have to disguise the taste of smoke on his breath.
Simon tossed the coffee into a nearby bin, strode back down to the room, and swiped his card to open the door. There was no sign of Jacob, and it gave him a second’s pause as he wondered if the idiot had snuck out through the back—or let someone in.
“Jacob?” He kicked the door shut behind him and reached under his jacket for the gun. A bed creaked, and he heard someone sigh in the dark.
“Thinking about where it all went wrong,” Jacob said.
“When you took up a life of crime, maybe?”
“Nah, I think it was Friday.”
Simon bit his lower lip, folded it tight between his teeth, and looked up at the ceiling. He didn’t want to laugh, but Jacob’s deadpan refusal to be anyone else but himself was… Jacob. He let go of the gun, allowed the weight of it to settle back into the holster, and walked down the short hall into the bedroom. Jacob was slouched in the low bucket chair in the corner, a lumpy, dripping washcloth resting on his battered hand. His hair was unruly, and one of his eyes was going black. He wasn’t a handsome man. He was almost pretty in a way that depended more on mobility and charm than on his unremarkably even, bony features. He wasn’t handsome, but he looked particularly rough just then. It didn’t matter. The lean sprawl of his body and the stubborn humor in his eyes clenched a familiar heat in Simon’s stomach.
