Chapter 6 Jacob

6 JACOB

NOW

Back in London, Jacob isn’t celebrating his divorce. Instead, he’s sweating bullets. The analytics appendix at the back of the document in front of him doesn’t make sense. He has looked it over several times and still something isn’t right. Dembe, their new partnerships officer and also his new girlfriend, stands at the front of the meeting room presenting the two packages they’ll be pitching to equity investors in a week’s time. She notices that he’s distracted and pauses, causing his business partner, Kabir, to give him a nudge.

“You OK?”

Jacob looks up. “Uh, yeah. Sorry.”

Dembe nods and clicks through to the next slide, a bracingly sci-fi background with a smiling woman in the middle.

“In an increasingly time-poor society, the complexity of the contract process is detrimental to customer satisfaction and business development. Our contract management software offers Shelley, a friendly AI assistant designed to empower users by extracting key information in seconds—”

“I’m sorry,” Jacob says suddenly, rising from his seat. “I have to—”

“Mate,” Kabir says, watching Jacob squeeze past, headed for the exit, “the meeting’s next Thursday.”

Jacob opens the door and glances back. “I’ll get Sam to debrief me.”

And then he walks out, striding down the hallway. He pulls off his tie and runs a hand through his silvering hair before bursting into the smaller office next to his, where his assistant, Sam, sits at his desk.

“Can you take over for me in the meeting room, please? I need notes to follow up on.”

Sam nods and rises quickly, spotting the urgency on his boss’s face.

In his office, Jacob is too agitated to sit down. He paces, palm to brow and face aglow with sweat, reading and rereading the meeting reports on the software package. Yes, he sees it, he’s sure, now that he’s alone—there has been a security infraction on the Shelley program. It’s such a small detail, so easy to overlook, but it’s there, and he can’t for the life of him figure out how it didn’t trigger any of their alarms.

Shit. He stands by his desk, his heart racing. Last night he did coke for the first time in months, and he’s feeling it today. He’s forty-five, in good shape, but his rib cage feels like it’s in a vise and his heart is beating wildly, even now that he has forced himself to stop pacing.

A knock on the door. He glances up, his jaw slack. It’s Sam.

“They’ve rescheduled the meeting,” Sam says, adjusting his glasses. A wary look. “Can I get you anything?”

Jacob shakes his head, conscious that he probably seems like he’s having a breakdown. “Actually, yes. Come in. Close the door.”

Sam looks alarmed but does as he’s told. Jacob shows him the analytics that are bothering him, the times and dates that make no sense.

“Can you pull the data on these?” he asks, taking out a pen from his shirt pocket and circling the ones in question. “Usernames, location, ISP. Whatever you can get ahold of.”

Sam studies the appendix. “When do you need this by?”

“Yesterday.”

A moment of hesitation. “OK.”

As Sam heads back into his office, Jacob considers that he has only himself to blame for this particular intrusion. God knows he’s tried to hold it together lately, keep up appearances, but the collapse of a marriage is no easy thing to manage. The logistical impact is endless. Darcy, off to the Maldives, has left him with the boys the very week he needs to concentrate, and the babysitter can only stay until six o’clock. This hack could be costly. He fears it might reveal a vulnerability in the exact same software they’re about to pitch to investors.

His brain spins in multiple directions at once, trying to deduce the reasons for the infringement, the cause, and—better yet—the solution. Last time they had a security violation, it ended up being a rival company, someone he had worked with years before. He had wanted to pay the guy off, but Kabir got the police involved. It turned out that the law hadn’t caught up yet, and so the guy walked free. The software was essentially binned.

He won’t let that happen again.

“I have something,” Sam’s voice says. He looks up, realizing that he has sat down, put his tie back on. Sam is staring at him, and it’s raining outside. It was sunny before. When did it start raining?

“I managed to pull out a couple of usernames and email addresses,” Sam says. “They’re probably not what you’re looking for—”

“Give it here,” Jacob says, tearing the sheet of paper out of Sam’s hands.

He looks it over, his eyes widening when he sees the names.

“Fuck,” he says.