by Emma Shortt
Was that selfish? Maybe so. But Chance had been, was still, at the point in his life where he wanted to be selfish. He wanted privacy. He wanted to be left the hell alone. Only, that wasn’t possible anymore. If Meg was right that a member of his senior management team was involved in the X-Tech fuck-up, and Chance had a nasty suspicion that she might be, then there could be answers here, and Chance had to do what he could to find them.
Senior management meetings were always held on a Thursday morning. After a five-mile run and a brutal workout, Chance made his way into the office. He almost never came here early in the day and it felt strange. He was wearing a gray sweater. A newer one that fit his new frame. He wore a baseball cap, too. Pushed down low on his head. The beard could not be disguised. But then, it wouldn’t be the first time the senior management team had seen it. They knew better than to post anything on the forums about him. At least, he hoped they did. If one of them was up to no good, then he might have to rethink that idea.
Gabe was the first to arrive after Chance. He had been with Chance since the beginning of X-Tech and was CEO in all but name. He was the one person who Chance thought he should be able to trust, and that was why he had checked Gabe’s personal files first. Had he expected to find anything? No. But he’d had to check all the same.
“Didn’t think you’d actually turn up,” Gabe said as he took the seat next to Chance.
“I thought it was about time,” Chance said.
Gabe reached out and clasped Chance on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you, Jack.”
Jack…when they were spending time together outside of work Gabe always called him “Chance.” But here, in the tower, he was always Jack…he always would be. “We saw each other last week,” Chance said.
“In the office, I mean.”
“I’m here every night,” Chance added.
Gabe grinned and sat back in his chair. “What you’re doing is deliberately misunderstanding me. Let me rephrase; it’s good to see you back as the CEO.”
Gabe had never been happy that Chance had stepped away from the company. They’d argued about it for years. Gabe wanted Jack to be an Elon Musk-type figure. Chance couldn’t imagine anything worse. That was something that Gabe was far more suited to, and it was true that the media lapped up every interview and unveiling that Gabe gave.
“You told them all I was coming?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“And?”
Gabe laughed softly. “They’ve all been assembling their portfolios. They’re going to show them off today.”
“They do realize that I check their portfolios every week?” Chance asked.
“Not for the reasons they want,” Gabe said. He paused for a moment. “How did you get on with solving your group theory problem?”
“It’s done,” Chance said.
“Hidden on your hard drive?”
“Of course.”
Gabe sighed. He alone knew the full extent of the mathematical and computational problems that Chance had solved. He had said more than once that he didn’t understand why Chance didn’t make them public. They would radically change the world, he said. And that was why, Chance replied. It was an ethical conflict that had never been resolved between them, and in some ways, it spilled over into the company as well. Chance was well aware that X-Tech’s reputation as a tech leader only remained because of the advances that Gabe and his team made. It was why he’d turned over a significant portion of the company to Gabe a few years back, making the other man a billionaire overnight.
“I got here early because I want to talk to you about something,” Gabe said.
“Go ahead.”
The other man shot him a look. “Mostly, I wanted to reassure you that there’s nothing in my personal drive that you need to worry about.”
It took some effort for Chance to keep his face blank. “How did you know?”
“You’re getting sloppy, my friend,” Gabe said. “I don’t know where you cribbed your search code from, but it had your signature in it.”
“My signature…” Chance almost winced. He had taken parts of the code from another program, an old one, and had recompiled it into the new program that he intended to use to search the personal drives of all his senior management team. He hadn’t realized he’d left in his “signature.” He’d created the thing when he was a lot younger. When he’d spend hours and hours on the Net taking down the sort of sites that should not be on there. The signature was a pixelated stop sign. No one but Chance and Gabe knew who it belonged to, and he’d stopped using it years ago.
The code ran through his mind.
How could he have missed it?
“Here.” Gabe reached across the table and passed Chance a flash drive.
“What is this?”
“I uploaded the contents of all their personal drives to this last night,” Gabe said. “Whatever you’re looking for you might find it on here. I assume you can use the same script to run a search?”
“Gabe…”
“Or do you need me to write that for you as well?” Gabe asked.
Chance looked across at the other man. He didn’t look angry, didn’t even look annoyed, mostly he just looked exasperated.
“I can’t talk to you about my…investigation. Not yet,” Chance said.
“Because I’m included in it?” Gabe asked. He sighed. “But then, you wouldn’t be doing this right if I wasn’t.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Chance said. “There’s something happening in the company and I—”
“I’m not a fool, Jack,” Gabe interrupted. “I’ve noticed some issues, as well. Leaps that were made out of nowhere? Gaps suddenly bridged? I thought at first that it was you. That you were finally coming back to us.”
“Gabe…”
“But when I sat down and thought about it, I knew it wasn’t. You’re more interested in making sure your ‘golden problems’ don’t become public than in solving any of the others.”
Golden problems…that was what Chance had called them in the early days. It had started out as a challenge between them. How many could he solve? But once Chance had begun solving them, he realized that they probably shouldn’t be solved. Not yet. Not until the world evolved, until the people in it did, too.
“You know why,” Chance said softly.
“I do,” Gabe replied. “And I’ve always respected it. Don’t like it, but I respect it.” He paused. “But if there is something going on in the company, I need you to respect the fact that it concerns me, too.”
“I do respect that,” Chance said. “It’s why I’m trying to fix it.”
“It would ease my mind to know you have help.”
“I do have help,” Chance said.
Gabe started at that. “Dare I ask who?”
Blue hair flashed through Chance’s mind. What would Gabe think of Meg when he finally met her? He started. Gabe wouldn’t be meeting Meg! The idea was completely impossible.
“I wouldn’t.”
“Okay…but if you need me, Jack,” Gabe said. “Just let me know.”
“I will.”
“Here we go.”
As if on cue, the other members of the senior management team began to pile into the room. They all had their eyes fixed on Chance. He resisted the urge to scratch at his beard. Gabe laughed softly as he settled back into his chair. Chance shot him a look before drawing in a deep breath. One by one the team took their seats and readied themselves to show their portfolios. Chance was going to sit through them. Who knew what might come up?
Three hours later, Chance was both impressed and worried. The projects that fell under his “Golden Group” were far more advanced than even he had realized. Where the fuck were they getting help from?
He questioned the team, poked and prodded at every bit of information. They were eager to respond, eager to impress. At a couple of points, for projects outside of the Golden Group, Chance found himself suggesting steps that would move their research
along. He even picked up a stylus and wrote out some code on the whiteboard, gesturing to where it needed to be inserted into the app that was being developed. One member of the team disappeared right after. Chance expected a breakthrough to be announced imminently.
“You’re not helping your reputation,” Gabe muttered as they broke for coffee.
“My reputation?”
“The untouchable genius,” Gabe said. “You come in and dole out solutions to problems that people have been grappling with for years. And you do it as if they’re the most obvious thing in the world?”
“They are obvious,” Chance said.
“To you,” Gabe replied. “To them?” He shook his head. “Not so much.” He sighed. “It only enhances your reputation.”
“You’d rather I didn’t help?” Chance asked.
Gabe laughed. “If you weren’t my closest friend, I’d already have liberated your hard drive and shared it with the entire company.”
Chance couldn’t help but laugh right back as he made his way over to the table where coffee and pastries were laid out. He pulled his cap a little lower and grabbed a mug just as someone said the word competition. He turned to see his Head of Data and his Head of Analytics gulping down coffee between rapid-fire sentences.
“Competition?” Chance asked.
Lucy turned to him with wide eyes. Abruptly, Chance wondered what she could see, what she thought of the man who owned X-Tech. That he was a genius, that was given. But also that he was strange? Standing in front of them in that gray sweater, baseball cap pulled low, a beard covering much of the rest of his face. Did she, did the rest of the management team wonder what had happened to the scrawny nerd from a decade ago? Did they wonder where he had gone? Or, to them, was he still Jack Richards? Would he always be that Jack Richards?
“Sorry, Jack?”
“You said something about a competition?”
“Yessss,” she said, drawing the word out. “We found some interesting ideas at the last competition we held.”
“What competition?” Chance demanded.
Lucy shot Rebecca a look. They were both fairly new to the senior management team, brought on by Gabe to help exploit advances in big data, though both had worked for the company for years. Even so, Chance wasn’t sure that he’d spent more than a couple of hours with either of them, mostly because their areas of work didn’t fall into the Golden Group, and so held little interest for him. They were both dressed like Kate. Abruptly, Chance found himself thinking about inkings that disappeared to who-knew-where.
Rebecca took another gulp of coffee, as if steeling herself. “It was just a local thing,” she said. “Invite only. We didn’t publicize it any way.” She frowned. “I know the competitions are supposed to go through marketing, but we found this forum where a whole bunch of local developers were talking about a solution to a big data problem we were grappling with.”
“We thought we could just get them around a table. Pose the problem,” Lucy said. “We might come up with a solution.”
“I haven’t seen any records on this,” Chance said.
Lucy shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “Um, I’m not sure there are any, Jack, not in the data center at least,” she said. “Like Becca said, we didn’t go through the marketing department.”
“You don’t have any files on what happened?”
“I have some on my personal drive,” Lucy said. “I haven’t had a chance to upload them.”
Chance gritted his teeth. He could feel the flash drive Gabe had given him in his pocket. It included the entire contents of Lucy’s personal drive, and presumably details of the competition. Where was Lucy on his list of suspects? Pretty low down. Chance had always intended to search Gabe’s drive first and then other members of the senior management team. He hadn’t imagined finding any details on X-Tech competitions on them, though. He’d assumed they would have been uploaded to the data center, the data center that came in a direct feed to him all day, every day. “What did you ask?” he finally said. “For them to pitch their ideas?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Just to get things started. We didn’t give them a brief. Just told them to bring whatever they were working on.” She frowned again. “None of them really fell into our areas of interest, though.”
“We passed their details on to the other heads of departments,” Lucy said quickly. “And we’ve hired one guy who we think can contribute to the problem. He has some fascinating ideas around regression—”
“I haven’t seen a new staff request in my inbox,” Chance said quickly, even as his mind raced.
“Paperwork hasn’t gone through yet,” Lucy replied.
“Meg Marlowe,” Chance practically snapped the words out.
Rebecca took another gulp of coffee. “The girl with the blue hair? Working on the traveling salesman problem? She was good.”
“Super smart,” Lucy said.
“Really nice, too,” Rebecca added. “We passed her details on to Robbie. He said we were further along than she is. Though he did say he might contact her to see if she had any insight.”
“And did he?” Chance asked.
The women looked at each other. They shook their heads. They either didn’t know or they weren’t sure. But then, suddenly, Chance wasn’t fucking sure, either. If the competition really was legit, and had been held to try and get some insight into a problem, then there was no way that Meg’s data could have been taken from there. And that meant their entire and only line of investigation was shot to shit.
Fists clenched, Chance nodded at the women before making his way back to his seat. Gabe nudged across a pastry. Chance ate it without even thinking about what he was doing. His mind was too full of the X-Tech fuck-up, and one issue raged above all others. Where the hell had Meg’s data been taken from…and more importantly…by whom?
Chapter Fourteen
That evening Meg was invited around to Kate and Will’s place for dinner. She tended to hang out with them a couple of times a week, but an “official invite” meant that there was a guarantee of good food because Will was cooking. He was in the kitchen when she let herself into the apartment. Meg took a seat at one of the barstools, propped up her chin on her hand, and watched him. He was doing something with vegetables. Meg had no idea what. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t cook to save her life.
Could Chance? Meg scowled at that thought. She’d spent the better part of the day thinking and fretting about him. She’d promised herself that her thoughts would be Chance-free tonight.
“Is that scowl directed at me?”
Will was paused with his knife hovering over a tomato. Meg shook her head. She was very fond of Will, hardly ever scowled at him.
“Nope.”
“You look peaky,” he said.
“I feel peaky,” Meg replied, and she was fully aware that she sounded sorry for herself.
“This is what happens when you stay up all night,” Will said. “Kate spent most of yesterday napping. She’s been grumpy all day.”
“I know,” Meg said. “I spent the day with her.”
“But not the night before,” Will said. “The night where there was no Netflix binge. The night she spent plugged into the servers at KIT.”
Meg winced. “She told you?”
“She’s an awful liar,” Will said. “Always has been.”
“Not to be that guy,” Meg said. “But I did not know she was planning on staying there all night. I would have totally talked her out of it.”
“I know that,” Will said. “What I don’t know is what’s going on with this Chance character.”
“You and me both,” Meg said.
“Let’s eat,” Will suggested. “Then we talk.”
Dinner was, as usual, marvelous, and Meg ate more than her fair share. Kate ate very little. Mostly, she picked at it. Meg knew why. Kate had asked for details of the first interview at lunchtime, but Meg had told her very little. For maybe the first time in her life, Meg didn’t
want to share what she had discovered with her best friend. Was it because she was embarrassed? Because Kate had clearly been right? Somehow Chance was connected to X-Tech. The most likely scenario was that they had hired him. Why, Meg did not know. What he hoped to get from the whole thing, she didn’t know, either. What she did know was that she was now in a horrible quandary.
He was a liar.
He was using her.
And she was ridiculously and worryingly attracted to him.
Attraction was not a new thing for Meg. She’d had plenty of boyfriends and lovers over the years. But she couldn’t remember feeling so strongly for someone so quickly. Throughout the day her thoughts had flipped between a burning indignation at his betrayal, and a moment later, a smoldering excitement at the way he made her feel when he was near. She imagined exactly what she was going to say when she next saw him. She tried out conversation openers in her head. She thought of saying nothing. Just waiting until the whole thing unfolded. In short, Meg had no idea what the hell she was going to do. She needed help.
“Time to start talking, Meg,” Will said, once their plates were cleared away.
“What would you like me to say?” Meg asked.
“You could start with why you’re keeping secrets from us,” Will said.
Kate looked up at that. Something flashed over her face. Meg knew what it was. Her best friend was hurt. Guilt slithered along Meg’s spine. Kate was probably the most important person in Meg’s life. Meg did not want to cause her friend any worry over what was happening. And yet, she didn’t know how she was going to avoid it. They told each other everything. Meg knew then that Chance could not be the exception to that. Seemed he was going to be in her thoughts tonight, whether she liked it or not.
“Chance is up to no good,” she eventually said.
Kate snapped her fingers. “I knew it.”
“Are you really going to sing the ‘I told you so’ song?” Meg asked.
