“I don’t know. Because it was all over the servers?” Jacob tossed a chip over the rail to a loitering duck. He tried not to think about the fact that Clayton’s corpse had been floating in the same murky water not twenty-four hours before. “Believe it or not, I was actually surprised. I read Porter as the type who’d cut his nose off to spite the board rather than admit someone could work something out that he couldn’t.”
“You weren’t wrong,” Simon said.
“I kinda was.”
“Could the information have been planted?”
Jacob tried to think of any way that might be true. He thought about lying to give Simon the answer he wanted, but this might actually be one of the rare occasions where the truth was best.
“I’d have noticed,” Jacob said. “My job is to get answers, not be fed them. The code wasn’t just sitting, taking up space in a Dropbox folder. There were over a dozen projects where this code was installed during the testing simulations. It was actively in use.”
Simon’s mouth went sour, and he took a drink of the coffee he was nursing and pulled a face at the burnt-bean taste even as he took another swallow. The clean line of his throat worked as the coffee went down, and his Adam’s apple bobbed under the freshly shaved skin. Jacob caught himself watching—staring—and pulled his attention back up to Simon’s face.
“That just proves thatsomeonetook the code, not that Dev did.”
“Maybe.”
They both knew that was a lie. Porter had his fingerprints on every proposal that got through to the R&D stage. Simon sighed, leaned back, and rubbed at his temples.
“Fine. Ignore that,” he said. Jacob squinted at him dubiously. It seemed a big thing to ignore. He opened his mouth to say so, but Simon impatiently waved a hand at him. “For now. How did PeaPod get hold of all this information now?”
Jacob sat back and brushed crumbs off his fingers. “Not from me. Not from Clayton.”
“And if the code was in so many projects, Syntech’s had it for a while, right? Why did Clayton suddenly get this bee in his bonnet about Dev stealing it?”
“I don’t know.” Jacob shrugged. “I did ask when I started the job, but Clayton was… on edge.”
“When he was hiring you?”
“Yeah. He was just twitchy—about breaking the law, about trusting me, about how much I charge, about what people would think if they found out. Or maybe he just knew what a shit storm this was going to turn out to be.”
“Can you find out?” Simon asked. He shrugged when Jacob looked askance at him. “You’re supposed to be the information-acquisition specialist, aren’t you? So go acquire some information. Impress me.”
Jacob hesitated. “I don’t know. This is not my—”
“It is,” Simon corrected him. “And you owe me. Despite the fact you conned me, I saved your ass the other night. And if I hadn’t stepped in, you’d still be in jail.”
He had a point. Jacob picked up his soda and sucked the cold sugar-rich stuff down. It chilled his throat, but it didn’t give the injection of energy he was after. It probably wouldn’t have helped, even if he’d been sucking the syrup straight from the spout.
It wasn’t the 90s anymore. He couldn’t pack up his troubles in a dead infant’s ID and disappear. Noteasily,notthoroughly.If Jacob Archer got framed for a high-profile murder, it would impact. It wasn’t as though he had a lot of marketable skills outside of telling what lies people wanted him to tell them.
Besides, like Simon had said, Jacob did owe him something.
“I’ll try,” he said. “I can’t promise anything.”
Simon raised an eyebrow at him and took a sip of his coffee. “I thought you were good.”
“I am,” Jacob said. He sounded more confident than he felt. Good? Yeah, he was. He was also under suspicion of murder, and that complicated things. A bit. “What are you going to be doing while I try to pull your boss’s ass out of the fire?”
A raised finger called their waiter over with the bill and an offer to box up the tortillas. Jacob refused awkwardly. He’d have felt bad for hogging the table, but it wasn’t as though there was a crowd waiting for a seat.
“Not ignoring things,” Simon said, and he handed his card over.
Chapter Ten
THE BROWN-DYEhair mousse smelled like bleach and left dirty marks on everything it touched. Simon frowned at a teardrop stain on his wooden floor. A dye job that would run in the rain and borrowed clothes didn’t strike him as a good disguise, but Jacob seemed to think it was good enough.
Worry poked at the back of Simon’s brain with fretful nails and tried to push through his impatience with the staticky on-hold music that filled his ear. He growled and strode over to stare out the window.
