“I’m an uncle,” he said. The ploy left a bad taste in his mouth—guilt and the memory of the burned cupcakes his sister had made him eat when they were kids—but it was a good lie. Jacob was rubbing off on him. “If any of this is true, I need to know for Callie’s sake. You were friends with my sister, Nora. For Becca. For her daughter.”
It took a second, but eventually Nora gave a damp sigh. “I’ll send you copies,” she said. “The way things are going, they’ll be public domain soon enough anyhow. Hell. I hate this.”
“Me too, Nora,” he said.
“Do you have a drink?” she asked as she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I need one.”
He did. It was a strange question to ask someone with a drinking problem, though. She knew it too. He didn’t keep it a secret. For a second Simon wondered how it’d look if he relapsed on top of everything else Nora had just listed. Bad for Dev, good for his second-in-command? It was a petty, paranoid thought, though, and he regretted it. Nora’d never wanted to be in charge of the company. The only reason she’d taken it on had been to help while Becca was sick. Dev was always joking about how glad she’d been when he came back and took it over again.
“Sorry,” he said. “Cupboard’s bare.”
“Ah,” she said. They sat quietly for a second until Nora leaned forward. She braced her hands on her knees, unconsciously mirroring his posture as she leveled a steady gaze at him. “If you find out anything, if Archer turns up again, you’ll let me know, Simon? Dev’s not talking to me. He says he doesn’t want to drag me down if something happens.”
He promised. Nora stared at him like she didn’t believe him. Then she grabbed her bag and left.
“Take care of yourself, Simon.”
She closed the door gently behind her, and a tug made the lock click into place. Simon went to the fridge for a beer. The scalloped edge of the edge dug into his thumb as he flicked the cap off. He took a swig and almost relished the reflexive jab of guilt that clenched between his ribs.
He did like Nora. He owed Nora for everything she’d done for Becca. In the end, though, it was down to Dev that he’d dragged himself out of the drunk tank and sobered up. So he wasn’t going to tell Nora anything.
If any of it was true, well—Simon took another spiteful swig of beer—then it served Dev right that Simon had screwed over his sobriety. Dev should have told him. He was family. Simon would have backed him up, no matter what—even if he was being a fucking idiot. Jacob could have been talked around, couldstillbe talked around. That was one benefit of having the Artful Dodger as your boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend.
Simon took another drink and then set the beer down on the counter. So he wasn’t going to turn Dev in, even if he had stolen the code. He was going to kick his ass until Dev could taste his own balls when he swallowed, but he wasn’t going to turn him in.
And if Dev had Clayton killed and framed Jacob for it? Simon picked up the beer to wash that thought away. He needed to know why Clayton had died. He needed answers before he made any big decisions. And whatever he felt about Jacob, he didn’t trust him enough to leave it up to him to get them.
The gun safe was bolted to the wall in the closet by the front door. Simon didn’t use it as religiously as he should—bad habits and the fact that he lived alone. He trusted himself with guns, and if someone broke in and took them off him, he deserved to die. The safe did come in handy sometimes, though. He pushed the code in and took out Jacob’s silver hard drive.
It should have felt heavier. All those secrets should have had a weight.
Since they didn’t, he tossed it idly in his hand as he headed for the couch and shoved a cushion out of the way to sit down. His laptop was under the coffee table, nearly as sleek, slim, and silver as the hard drive. That made sense, he supposed, since it was Jacob who had convinced him to upgrade from his battered old Toshiba.
He hooked the hard drive up and waited as it synced. At the prompt he tapped in Jacob’s password from memory. He didn’t even need to check the card. After a few years memorizing coordinates in the desert, he was good at recalling strings of numbers.
The drive opened automatically, and folders and files laid themselves out like decks of cards. Most of it might as well have been in Urdu, for all Simon understood it. He was hardly tech-illiterate—you couldn’t rise in the ranks these days without the ability to use a computer—but converting ACQ files was a bit above his paygrade.
What he needed was barely above meat-space tech, just a list of all the projects that Clayton’s code had been used in. It took a couple of minutes of clicking through files and organizing by type, but eventually he found them.
Fourteen projects had used the code, twelve where the project had been built on it. He grabbed a screenshot of the list to start with, threw it over to his phone, and then disconnected the drive. Leaving it to tick itself to sleep, he pulled up the link to the Syntech network server.
Another set of passwords and an automated virus scan of his hard drive, and he had remote access to the Syntech servers. He wondered—as he quickly archived his e-mails and set them to download to his laptop—if he could take the fact that Jacob had never tried to get access that way as proof that he had been, as much as he could manage, honest?
It was a nice thought, but it didn’t hold up to scrutiny. Simon’s access was second only to Dev’s, but this server was basically just admin—bank accounts, personnel records, reports, and red tape. Nothing you’d want someone outside the company laying eyes on, but the meat and marrow of Syntech—the R&D, the global virtual simulations, the genetics of their science—was only accessible from inside the building. That was mostly for security, but partially because some of the files were so big and resource heavy that just looking at them would give a laptop an inferiority complex.
That was what Jacob had needed to prove his case—not the budgets and the HR complaints. Luckily enough, however, budgets and HR was exactly what Simon needed.
It took two hours of cross-referencing and another bottle of beer, but there’d been two researchers who worked on most of the code-corrupted projects—Ryan Lau and Mathilde Delacourte. According to the employee records, Mathilde was currently at a symposium in Berlin and Ryan had sent in his notice after being stationed in a research station in Alaska for three months.
Simon actually remembered that. It was weird. Ryan had spent three months living in a shack with only a radio and two loved-up British ornithologists from Xeon, the Chinese company that built the research facility. He’d been within a working week of a bonus and a free flight home when he e-mailed his resignation.
It was weird enough that Simon discreetly put a security detail on him for a month to make sure Xeon’s happy hippy lesbians hadn’t convinced him to break the no-competition clause in his contract.
Nothing raised a red flag… at the time.
Simon braced his elbows on his knees and pressed his knuckles against his lower lip. According to the reports for the board, there was no unifying theme between the fourteen projects that had used the code. Four had been looking into the nitrogen cycle, five at various botany models, one into solutions to reef bleaching, two into noise pollution, and the last two had been climate related. All of them used Icarus heavily.
It was research for the data model on one of those that had sent Ryan to Alaska.
