Chapter 19 Jacob

19 JACOB

NOW

God, he wishes he had trained as a software engineer. He has a first-class honors degree in computer science, but given that it’s from 1999, he might as well have studied dentistry.

It’s Saturday morning. He has five days to work out the kinks in this software product. It would be much faster if one of the QA guys could do it, but Jacob needs to keep this under wraps for now. He sent an email to his girlfriend of two months, Dembe, carefully worded—he doesn’t want this to get back to Kabir. He asked her for instructions to run another security audit. She suggested penetration tests, which he has done, both black- and white-box tests.

So far, everything seems to be fine. His biggest worry was command injection. Seeking investment for an AI product riddled with bugs would be disastrous.

Jacob can’t deny that this is all his own fault. Given his state of mind lately, it’s possible that the analytics problems aren’t indicative of vulnerability, not at the level of coding or hacking.

He might just be making this problem bigger than it really is.

Even so, the email addresses that Sam produced shouldn’t be anywhere near his product. And then there’s a name in there that he doesn’t recognize—Adrian Clifton. A Google search has yielded no clues. Who is this guy? Why is there no email address for him? Jacob needs to dig deeper. He was shocked when he recognized the names of the users associated with the hack. Camilla Papaki and Kate Miller. Friends of bloody Darcy’s. He’s heard her mention them in passing.

Camilla’s response to his email about it was abrupt. Fuck off. Nice. Not the kind of woman he ever expected Darcy to be associating with. Did they access the software at Darcy’s home, on her computer? Or is she part of this? She knows about the investment meeting. She knows how important this product is.

She helped him grow the company. He managed to get her to sign over most of her shares, leaving her with much less in the divorce settlement than she might have had. Perhaps this is payback.

Perhaps it’s paranoia.

He pours himself another cup of coffee from the French press on his desk and decides to keep pushing. The last thing he needs is the investment to fall through because of a tiny software hole he can’t find. Adrian Clifton is the missing piece of the puzzle here. He writes the name down on the desk notepad and circles it.

“Dad?”

Jacob looks up from his desk in the small room at the top of his house. His oldest boy, Charlie, stands in the doorway. He’s wearing his pajamas and his hair is ruffled.

He gives Charlie a nod. “You OK, son?”

“Can I come in?” the boy asks.

Jacob gives a sigh. He could really do without being interrupted just now. “Sure. What can I help you with?”

Charlie approaches warily and flops down in the armchair beside the desk. He’s getting tall, Jacob can see that. The same look in his eye that Jacob has in his old school photos from this age. Stubbornness, rebelliousness. The thought occurs to him that Charlie might be doing drugs, and he feels nauseous.

“What’s your new girlfriend like?” Charlie asks. “Dembe?”

“Oh,” Jacob says. “She’s nice. She has a daughter. Jasmine. I haven’t met her yet.”

“Will we get to meet her?”

“Well, yes. I think so.”

“Will she be a good stepmom?”

Jacob gives a nervous laugh. He likes Dembe very much, surprisingly so. “What’s all this about, then?”

Charlie drops his eyes to his hands. “Have you talked to the solicitor about the custody?”

Jacob thinks. “Uh, not yet.”

Charlie meets his eye. “Why not?”

“Well, living with me full-time is a big deal. I thought we’d see how it goes.”

“I thought you asked for full custody,” Charlie says, and Jacob looks away. The bid for full custody was his lawyer’s idea. He dropped it shortly after, settling for joint custody.

“Charlie. Look, I do want you. But your mum… she’ll be upset.”

“I don’t care,” Charlie says.

Jacob pauses, considering his words. Charlie’s a good boy, and he’s not given to disliking people. He used to be such a mummy’s boy, just like his younger brothers. Jacob never imagined any of the children choosing to live with him after the divorce. It was after that trip Darcy took him on that Charlie got really angsty. The theater weekend. He contemplates whether he should press Charlie a little more, but bites it back. Charlie withdraws under scrutiny.

“I want to be sure this is really what you want, son,” Jacob says.

“It is,” Charlie says, his face tilted up at Jacob. “It is.”

Jacob sighs. “OK. I’ll email my lawyer tonight.”

“Ben and Ed want to live here, too.”

Jacob gives another nervous laugh. “They do?”

Charlie nods. “I think it would be good. It’s closer to our school here. The rooms are bigger.”

“Uh, we’ll have to see,” Jacob says, scratching his beard. He needs to shave. “Go on to bed now.”

Charlie seems pleased, the corners of his mouth threatening to lift upward for the first time in weeks. “Remember I told you about Lennie Aspie?” he says.

“The boy who was bullying you?”

Charlie nods.

“I thought he stopped bullying you,” Jacob says.

“He did. Mum intervened.”

Jacob raises his eyebrows. “That’s good, right?”

Charlie looks like he wants to say more, but Jacob needs to wrap this up quickly. He has work to do.

“Off to bed,” he says. “It’s late.”

“What’s that?” Charlie asks, spotting the notepad on his desk, with the name Adrian Clifton written in capitals and circled several times.

“Oh,” Jacob says. “Nobody. Just someone I work with.”

Charlie’s eyes are wide. “I need to show you something. Stay here.”

Jacob watches as he darts out of the room, returning a minute later with a small piece of paper, torn from a larger sheet.

“Here,” Charlie says, handing him the piece of paper.

Jacob takes it, opens it. There is a row of eleven numbers, which he deduces to be a mobile phone number. On the other side, he finds ADRIAN written in Darcy’s handwriting.

“What is this?” he says, looking up sharply.

Charlie looks bashful now. “I saw this film the other day. About a spy. He had this secret phone and—”

“Charlie,” Jacob says, his voice a little loud, “what is this?”

Charlie hesitates. “I found a phone in Mum’s wardrobe at home. It was like the secret phone in the film.”

Jacob narrows his eyes, trying to work out what his son is saying. “A secret phone?”

Charlie nods. “It wasn’t an iPhone. Just one of those cheap ones like she got me when I went to camp.”

“How do you know it was secret?”

“I saw her,” he says. “She was using it. And then I saw her hide it from me and the boys. So later, I went and looked for it. But I couldn’t find it.”

Jacob turns his body all the way around now, facing his son. “OK. And?”

“I found this piece of paper in her drawer, tucked away. I thought it might be important.”

Jacob looks down at the phone number, his mind spinning. “OK. Well, thank you.”

Charlie smiles, pleased to have done something he considers to be useful. Jacob watches him slink out of the room, perplexed. It’s a bit strange, the way Charlie wants to live with him. A hassle, in more ways than one. But he feels flattered. Darcy has always been there for the boys, he knows that.

Turning back to the computer, he sees Kate Miller’s email address on the screen.

He begins to type a message.