“Sis,” Jacob interrupted and put the phone to his ear. “Not a good time.”
“It’s less than two weeks to Christmas. You haven’t bought a single present, have you? Admit it. That’s why you’ve been avoiding my calls.”
“You’re annoying. That’s why people avoid your calls,” Jacob snapped. He stopped and pinned the irritation behind his teeth. People were trying to kill him or send him to jail. Either way he probably shouldn’t end what might be his last call with his sister on a bad note. “Sis, I love you, but this is a bad time. I have to go.”
She ignored him. Jacob hung up anyhow. He shoved the phone into his back pocket, and the denim pulled tight over his hip bones. He glared at Simon. “That was private.”
A dark eyebrow twitched up at a sardonic angle. “So was the information you stole from Syntech.”
“That was business,” Jacob said. It was also complicated. Simon might be brooding over the “never really knowing you” thing, but he already knew more than most people. Not that Jacob hadmeantthat to happen, but it was still disconcerting, and giving him more info wasn’t the way to deal with it. “This was my sister, and she’s not involved in any of this.”
“Okay,” Simon said.
It was too easy. Jacob eyed him suspiciously, but it didn’t seem as though Simon had anything else to say. After a second, Jacob shook his mood off and walked across the loft to his computer, which hummed along discontentedly. He reallyshouldremember to turn it off, he thought absently as he set his beer down on a stack of receipts.
“This is going to be quicker than Walmart,” he said as he pulled the phone out of his pocket and shoved it under a folder. “It’s still going to take a while, though.”
Simon nodded agreeably. He flipped his jacket back and put his hands in his pockets, all broad shoulders and lean waist.
“Do you think those men from last night will leave your sister out of it?” he asked.
Jacob wiped his hands on his jeans and flopped down into the chair. The sudden weight sent him sliding backward. He refused to let Simon’s question sink in deep enough to be a worry.
“They have no reason to go after her. They have no reason to know who she is.” He dragged himself back to the desk by his heels. Then he hesitated as he reached for the keyboard and his fingers hovered over the keys. “You didn’t say anything, about—”
“I didn’t get the chance.” Simon pushed a tangle of shirts off the couch and sat down. He leaned back and hung an arm along the back of the cushions. But there was nothingrelaxedabout him. “What does she think you do?”
“Market research,” Jacob said. He impatiently hammered the space bar with his finger until the computer woke up and the screen flickered back to life. He caught Simon’s snort, glanced over, and shrugged. “It’s not alie.It’s just market research with a bit of theater. Most of the time.”
“You pretended to be a cleaner for months. You created a fake sweepstakes and paid for a holiday to Europe, so you could get a place on the Syntech crew. It’s a bit more complex than calling up and asking if we watch Fox News or ABC.”
“That was your fault,” Jacob said absently. A pulsing notification sat in the toolbar at the bottom of Jacob’s screen. He clicked it and quickly scanned down the names, half his attention on that and half on his conversation with Simon. Two job offers, ten updates on his no-sleep series, and a bunch of bad jokes from people he didn’t want to have to explain to Simon. He cleared the list, swiped the cursor back over to his server, and tapped the password in at the prompt. His bruised hand fumbled the keys until he gave in and hunt-and-pecked it in one-handed. “Security was too good to getanythingremotely. I had to do it old-school.”
That got him another snort. He pulled up the Syntech data packets out of the archive and keyed up the program to bundle and transfer them to the segmented subnet. As the percentages started to count down, he grabbed the beer. Simon raised his eyebrows at whatever message he read on his phone.
“It doesn’t make any sense, you know,” Jacob said.
“What?”
“This.” Jacob waved his bruised hand at Simon. “Any of it. There’s nothing in here that’s worth killing someone over. The code was part of Clayton’s PhD thesis. It’s accessible through the college’s library catalog, if someone really wanted it. The only value in this data is that it proves Syntech was using it without permission.”
Simon frowned and tapped one finger against the back of the leather couch. Tap, tap, tap.
“It sounds like you’re saying Dev’s the only one with motive.”
Jacob sat back and rested the beer bottle on his thigh. “It occurred to me,” he admitted. “Seriously, though, it’s not worth it even for him. Getting caught using code that’s just been sitting in a thesis gathering dust? It’s a settlement, a carefully worded nonapology, and a few years of tight smiles when it comes up in interviews. It’s not worth killing someone over. I can make a guess at how much Clayton would have gotten, and it’s a lot to me. But it’s cutting a decade’s worth of annual donations to the Alzheimer’s Society for your boss.”
Jacob remembered how Clayton’s bitten-short nails scrabbled at the floor as he died, and the crack of a palm against his face as the thugs tried to bully him into not dying. It was weird how loud it was when someone stopped breathing. He hadn’t known the man. It had been a shock watching him die, but that wasn’t the same as caring. Still it felt like a waste.
“Clayton died for a principle and what’s basically pennies at that level of rich.” Jacob shook his head, pulled open a drawer, and grabbed a burner phone still in the plastic. He tried to rip the plastic apart, huffed irritably, and took his teeth to the corner when it resisted him. Around the mouthful of plastic, he grumbled, “I don’t know if I should think it’s tragic or stupid.”
Chapter Eight
BRAVE HADN’Teven occurred to Jacob as an option.
Jacob had gone to get changed and left the computer to work. Simon’s stomach started to make itself heard over the two missed meals. He stood in front of the fridge and tried to work out what to make of the sparse selection—a jar of pickled onions and peppers, a can of corned beef, and three cheese slices that were curling and dry at the corners.
And two bottles of beer, chilled and waiting on the shelf. He tried to ignore that, or howgoodhis brain insisted the bottle would feel in his hand or the beer on his tongue.
