“And to be ever fairer, Clayton had a photo of your wife in his houseanda couple of angry mercenaries who wanted to burn the house down in there too,” Jacob interrupted from the couch. He shrugged under both sets of scowls. “What? I just think the latter might be relevant as well. What with them trying to kill us.”
“A few weeks ago,Iwanted to kill you,” Dev pointed out. “What was Harry hiding behind Becca?”
Jacob rubbed his finger against the tip of his nose and blinked around his knuckles. “Fuck if I know, to be honest,” he said. “And before anyone insults my professional skills again, I’ve cracked the password on it, and there’s reams of what looks like pretty advanced computer code on there. It could be the codebase for a new social-media platform, databases, or a sudoku generator. I don’t have the knowledge base.”
“Let me see.” Dev pushed himself off the window.
Jacob obediently turned the laptop toward him. Dev dropped into a crouch by the table, put his water between his feet, and frowned at screen with interest. He flicked the screen up and down in flickering jerks past patches and squares of the code.
“I thought you were a biochemist,” Jacob said.
“I’m a genius,” Dev said. “I pick things up. And you can’t be anything in science these days without having some understanding of computers.”
He hunched his shoulders and squinted at the screen as he fingertapped his way down through the file. His eyes flickered as he scanned the screen full of symbols and shortcuts.
“It looks like a predictive modeling program, only more advanced than anything we’re looking at right now. Better stability, able to run comparison models side-by-side.” Dev paused, and his eyes glinted as he read a string of code. “It has a support vector machine algorithm that bundles unsupervised cluster learning with—”
“Hey, genius?” Jacob said. “Can we try some shorter words for the just-smart in the room?”
Dev looked daunted by the request. He frowned, his forehead furrowed with deep lines, and scratched the back of his neck.
“I don’t think there are shorter words for some of it,” he said. “Basically, at the moment, we build a virtual world, release a digital version of Icarus, and see what happens. Usually it’s that the computer bricks itself after a few cycles because the scenario gets too complicated for it to manage. This program could run more complicated scenarios for longer and faster than we can hope to right now. If this model of Harry’s works as it should, it would be the most advanced artificial neural network in the business. He’d need some serious hardware to run it on, but it’s brilliant. I mean, if this was what I was supposed to have stolen? I’d have been tempted.”
Simon interrupted him. “Not really helping your case here.”
“I said I would have been tempted, not that I would. Or had,” Dev said. He sat back and rolled his shoulders to stretch out his back. “Steal this, and I’m stuck. It’s—and I hate to say it—inspired, but it’s not finished, and without Harry it might never be. Besides,thisisn’t what I’m supposed to have stolen. I don’t think anyone but Harry’s seen this. I would have heard the chatter about it.”
Simon pulled his phone out of his pocket and drew up the list of contaminated projects. He handed it to Dev. “These were the projects using Clayton’s code.”
It took longer than Simon expected to get a response. Dev furrowed his brow as he studied the list of names and departments. Guilty conscience? His arm throbbed again as gravity tugged at his bones. He gave in to it and grabbed a seat on the couch.
“This isn’t right,” Dev said finally. He hesitated and glared at the list like intensity could change what it said. “None of these projects should be here.”
Jacob stretched over to take his computer back, pulled it up off the table, and balanced it on his folded legs. “Did you think you’d hidden them better?”
“Shut up, Jacob,” Simon said, cutting off Dev’s growl. “Why not?”
“They’re old, mothballed projects.” Dev flicked up and down through the list again and shook his head in baffled annoyance. “Most of these are over a decade old, and these last two were ghost files. The projects never made it past concept stage, and I never got around to stripping the shell-space out of the server. Things came up.”
He paused, clenched his jaw, and then snapped his fingers at Jacob. “Do you still have the files you stole?”
There was a pause as Jacob pulled a confused who-me face, as though he’d never heard of any of those words.
“It’s a bit late for that,” Simon said. “At this point we’re hardly going to turn you in.”
Jacob tilted his head to look at Dev and waited until the big man rolled his eyes. “Someone was stealing from Harry, and now they’re framing me. It turns out that you raiding my company was the best thing that could have happened.”
“First time anyone’s said that,” Jacob muttered. He leaned over to grab the hard drive from the table and held it out.
Instead of taking it, Dev leaned back. He held his hands up, palms out and fingers spread. “No. When we find out who’s behind this and take it to the board, I want there to be clear blue water between me and the data on that drive.” He pulled a pen out of his pocket and scribbled an e-mail address on the back of a business card, digging the nib into the card when the ink didn’t take the first time. “E-mail the data to this address. No one should be able to track it to me.”
“What about the researchers on the project?” Simon asked. “Ryan Lau. If these projects weren’t active, what was he working on?”
Dev rubbed his hand over his mouth as he thought. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted. Frustration drove him up onto his feet, and he swiped the wrinkles out of his trousers with both hands.
“After Becca got sick, and…. Well, I had more important things than business to think about. It’s why the board intervened to pull Nora up out of R&D—which she still hasn’t forgiven me for. It’s also what gave them the foothold to push me out over this as well. I don’t know what Lau was working on over that period. When I came back, he wasn’t on my radar until he requested a secondment to an Alaskan research base.”
It was a good opportunity to share the information that Ryan was working for the military and that he was in San Antonio. The fact that Simon held his tongue meant, he supposed, that he still wasn’t entirely convinced that Dev was whiter than white in all of it. Maybe he’d just been hanging around Jacob too much, but he was getting used to not trusting people.
