Job Hunt (27 page)

Gareth had always been good at throwing others off track, and Jack approved of the tactic, though in contrast to his superiors he was more inclined to assume guilt until innocence was proved. He had substantially increased the number of bogus data sets in circulation before following the trail of the leaked data halfway around the world to end on the website of a south-coast building contractor. The company had gone to the wall three years earlier, but the website offering the company’s services was still live and being updated by someone at least once a month. The story got interesting the moment Frazer—tracing the technical leak—arrived at exactly the same website.

Jack added a ninth ball to the eight spinning in the air and then a tenth. He rested his head against the edge of his chair and focused on the flashes of color. Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware of Frazer studying the coding and construction of the building company’s website on three of his four screens, of Gareth stopping beside him at intervals, of Julian Nancarrow’s PA placing more financial information on a corner of his desk with an apologetic smile.

His focus remained on the red and gold balls. Each flash of color connected data points: turnover linked to employee numbers, profits to tax allowances, loans to repayments to bonuses, and back to employee numbers. The various takeover bids, amicable and hostile, that Julian Nancarrow had briefed him on the previous week found a place in the pattern, as did hacking attacks, grievance procedures, and dismissals.

A large mug of steaming black coffee appeared on the corner of his desk. Gareth didn’t linger or interrupt, and Jack caught the spinning spheres one by one and dropped them into his lap. The coffee was strong and sweet enough to rot his teeth. It reminded Jack that he’d skipped lunch and that being so well known wasn’t always a bad thing. At the very least, it cut out the migraines.

When he set the empty mug back on the table, he’d decided to make time to eat in the future, rather than ruin exceptionally good coffee with sugar. He had also convinced himself that the company’s finances, bogus or not, weren’t causing the itch in his brain. He picked up the juggling balls and tossed them about idly while he waited for the caffeine to jumpstart his brain. The technical data then: mining, prospecting, deposits, yields, concessions, exploitation costs, mineral prices, refining operations, environmental impact studies, clean up, commodities, stock prices, coffee, commodities….

Commodities.

Jack sat up straight. One by one, the juggling balls spiked high into the air before hitting the carpet around his feet in a soft patter. He didn’t notice. His hands found the keyboard, and all four screens in front of him flared to life. He smiled when he heard the door to Gareth’s office hit the wall with a crash and looked up.

“The problem with a photographic memory,” he said when Gareth stood beside him expectantly, “is that you rarely consciously compare images.”

Two of the screens in front of him showed the same page from the building company’s website. At first glance, they were identical. At a second glance, though….

“The text.”

“Yep.” Jack nodded. “I’d say there’s your finance data. Hidden in plain sight.” Gareth grunted something about peas in a pod that Jack tuned out. He wasn’t having that discussion today. Or ever. At least the man had the sense not to push. He just sat on the edge of Jack’s desk and pulled out his phone.

“What do you need?”

“Two teams.”

“Fuck this!” Frazer flew into the room he’d left only minutes earlier. He skidded to a stop behind Jack and looked over his shoulder at the screen. Jack could hear the dismay in the Scot’s voice as he put the facts together. “Keywords? That’s just….”

“Pull analytics, Adwords, Market Samurai, Wordtracker—any of that shit,” Jack said as if he’d never been interrupted. “I don’t care. Just match the numbers.”

“And the second team?”

“This has been updated last night,” Jack informed his superior. “And just yesterday Frazer planted a little surprise on the server hosting the site.”

“Don’t drag me into this, Horwood. You did the sneaking and planting of stuff.”

“You designed it.”

“I didn’t break in, though.”

“Fine, fine. And only yesterday Frazer designed a little surprise, which ended up on the server hosting the site.”

“I got it, thanks,” Gareth said dryly. “So Frazer determines the source, and you trace the transmission. How do we find out who the data is going to?”

“We don’t.” Frazer sounded defeated. “It’s like a billboard at Waterloo Station. No way to tell who reads it. No way to know who understood what they read.”

“Maybe,” Jack commented absently, already engrossed in picking up the trail of Frazer’s Trojan.

“Horwood, share!” Frazer demanded.

“That’d be the day.” A voice could be heard grumbling from across the office. “The famous hacker sharing his secrets. Yeah, right.”

“If you have something to say, Mason, say it to my face,” Jack replied without heat before he turned to Frazer. “You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.” After watching the Scot work for just a few days, Jack was already convinced that Frazer paid far too much heed to jealous idiots like Mason and rarely gave himself enough credit. It was time to change that.

N
OBODY
IN
Nancarrow Mining’s corporate security division went home that evening. Frazer dished out jobs left and right, and every person in the team pored over stacks of numbers, trying to find patterns that matched the company’s finance data.

Gareth felt oddly nostalgic as he turned his office into an impromptu dorm with air beds and sleeping bags and made sure that everything from sandwiches to pizza and freshly made curry was available to soak up the seas of caffeine washing through the room before he settled down with his own stack of numbers.

Jack’s desk was a haven of peace in all the to-ing and fro-ing, the muttered curses, and noisy cryptography debates that sprang up when a set of figures looked as if it might fit. He didn’t join in the conversations, and neither did he theorize ahead of his data. Jack barely moved. He kept his hands poised over his keyboard and his eyes intent on the data on his screens. Every now and then, he would rub the tattoo on his temple as if it helped him focus. Bursts of rapid typing alternated with long periods of nothing but watching data scroll and slide into geometric shapes, and Gareth couldn’t tell from Jack’s expression if Jack was anywhere near achieving his objective. He was as methodical and patient as a hunter on the trail of a large predator.

And about as silent.

It startled everyone, therefore, when Jack suddenly jumped up, grabbed his phone and tablet, and hurried toward one of the small meeting rooms in the back. He turned and met Gareth’s gaze before he slipped through the doorway, and Gareth abandoned his stack of numbers, pushed to his feet, and followed.

He should have expected Jack to have a Skype session running when he entered, but the two boys who were in his mother’s care had slipped his mind.

And didn’t that make him feel like a heel?

“Where are you?” Nico’s voice came over the loudspeaker as he stepped up behind Jack and looked down at the small screen showing Nico and Daniel in the living room of the safe house.

“Still at work,” Jack replied. “We’ve got a major lead on the data thief.”

There must have been a grin on Jack’s face when he said that because Nico smiled wide, leaned forward, and demanded details.

“Remember what I told you about the website?”

“You both got there. You and your colleague.”

“Right. And we couldn’t work out how they hid the information. Now we have.”

“How?” Daniel was right alongside his friend now, head almost in the screen.

“It’s a code,” Jack confided. “Numbers into words. The text changes every few days, but only a little, so we had trouble spotting it. Wanna see if you can crack it? I can send you a bit of it.”

“What if we don’t know how? Can we ask Raf?”

Gareth leaned close enough for the camera to catch him and smiled a greeting of his own, pleased about the chance to put his hands on Jack’s shoulders. “My mum’s good at codes,” he said. “You can ask her to help.”

“No way!”

“Yes, way! When you’re in the army, people read your mail, so my dad used to write in code when he wrote letters home. That’s how she learned.”

“You’re not coming over today, are you?”

Jack shook his head.

“We did the training with Raf,” Nico said after a moment. “It was different.”

“That makes sense. Every person fights differently, depending on where they grew up and who taught them. It’s good if you can work with Raf.”

“He’s okay.”

“I’ll come over as soon as I’ve caught the thief,” Jack said. “If I can’t make it, I’ll call, right?”

“Can we… call you?” Daniel’s voice was barely louder than a whisper, but Jack heard.

“That’s why I put my number into your phone. Call when you need to, okay?” Jack was about to sign off when Daniel leaned forward.

“Jack?”

“Hm?”

“I didn’t have a nightmare last night.”

Gareth felt Jack’s muscles go rigid under his hands before he breathed out a long soft gust of air and melted into the seat. He didn’t reply, not with words Gareth could hear. Maybe he’d made a face at the screen, because the last thing Gareth heard before Jack signed off and the connection closed was Daniel’s soft giggle. It brightened the room and relaxed Jack to the point where Gareth felt safe teasing him.

“Did you really need me as backup to deal with two wayward teens?”

Jack slid down in the chair until his head leaned against the backrest, and he looked straight up at Gareth. “Not really,” he smirked. “I just wanted to have you to myself for a minute before I head back to the zoo.”

“They are rather loud.”

“It’s called enthusiastic. And I don’t mind.” He drew another deep breath and let it out, dropping his shoulders on the exhale. “Did your parents really communicate in code?”

“Yep. Mum used to teach math, so….”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Are you going to send them bits of code to crack?”

Jack looked maybe a little embarrassed, but he nodded anyway. “I put something together when I realized I wasn’t gonna make it over to see them.”

“A distraction.”

“Yes. I know they’re safe, and I know it can’t be helped, but it still makes me feel like shit, you know?”

“They handled it well.”

“They shouldn’t have to handle it at all.”

Frustration peeked through the fatigue, and Gareth frowned. “Maybe you should ride over.”

“I left my bike at your house,” Jack reminded him as he slipped out of the chair and straightened up. His lashes painted a dark shadow on his cheeks. “It’s fine. Really. We’ll run with this as far as it takes us, and I’ll go see them after.”

“Make a better job of convincing yourself.” Gareth chuffed. “That one was pathetic.”

Jack grabbed his gear and waved a finger at Gareth on the way out. “Get bent, Flynn.”

B
Y
4:00
a.m., most members of their team had stopped for a nap, leaving Gareth alone with Jack in the main office. Gareth kept himself awake through sheer force of will, sifting through stack after stack of numbers. The right encoding continued to elude them, and it looked as if Jack’s attempts at tracking the source weren’t any more successful. Jack was stubbornly glued to his screens, but his shoulders were up around his ears. His chin pushed forward, and his head tipped to the right, advertising the fact that he had a headache to anyone who knew how to read him.

“Are you close to taking a break?”

Gareth gently rubbed his palms over Jack’s tight shoulders while he watched a misshapen… thing… on Jack’s screen twist itself into a perfect hexagonal dodecahedron.

Jack leaned back into Gareth’s touch and pointed at the screen. “See that?”

“Yes?”

“That says it’s time for a break.”

“Right.” Gareth found every ounce of skepticism he possessed and poured it into his voice. He didn’t understand the significance of the geometric shapes, but while Jack was tired and hurting, he didn’t want to ask. “Go crash,” he said instead. “When do you want me to wake you?”

“Seven?” Jack pulled the top drawer open and hunted around inside it without actually looking down. “Do you have aspirin?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“W
HAT
? W
AIT
.”
Jack rolled off the low air mattress and headed out of Gareth’s office-turned-crash pad. He used his phone as a torch and moved silently so as not to disturb any of the sleepers, rubbing at his gritty eyes. The light outside was hazy, the air full of moisture that hadn’t yet decided whether to turn into mist or rain. Jack had no idea what time it was. Early enough, at any rate, that he caught the orange glow of streetlights through the murk, and he’d slept at least long enough for the aspirin to kick in and take the edge off his headache.

“Can you say that again?” he asked, closing the door behind him and drawing a deep breath.

“Clive has been stabbed.” It was hard to miss the tight, angry edge in Lisa’s voice. “They found him a couple of hours ago in the alley behind the club.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“Why was he in the club? Or was he?”

“I don’t know,” Lisa sighed. “He was in surgery when I got here, and he’s too hopped up right now to make any sense. I was hoping you knew.”

“Nope. Haven’t spoken to him since… I dunno…. Tuesday?”

“Where are you?”

“At work. Want me to come over?”

“No. Maybe later. Why are you at work at five o’clock on a Saturday morning?”

“I have things to do?”

“Sure,” Lisa snapped. “Listen, can you meet me here later? Say, lunchtime? Clive should be awake enough to talk then.”

Jack heard the pain in her voice, remembered the sudden heat in Clive’s face when Lisa Tyrrell had appeared outside the club on the heels of Ricky’s death, and felt like a certified asshole. He and Lisa might barely know each other, but he owed Clive Baxter better than that. “I’ll come over now if you want me there,” he offered by way of an apology.