Page 28 of The Refusal

God, I hope not. I fiddle with a strand of my hair as heat rises up my neck.

“Um, not really, um … just a date,” I mumble, and the handset goes quiet.

“With your boyfriend?” he eventually says, and my brows furrow in confusion. Boyfriend? What the hell is he talking about?

“Ummm,” I say, voice rising, and a strange silence balloons as panic fills my chest. But I can’t grill him on this now. Lewis is watching me, listening in to every word.

“Anyway, none of my business,” he rushes on, filling the dead air. “I wanted to find out if you could come into the office tomorrow. I’m sorry to ask on a Saturday, but I’ve got something important I need to chat to you and Matt about.”

“No problem, what time?”

“About 11 a.m.? That work for you?” He’s all business.

“Sure, sounds fine, I’ll see you—”

But the phone goes dead before I have a chance to say goodbye.

18

Janus

Matt and Jo sit across from where I’m standing at our big board table. Looking out through the colored-glass walls, I can see a few lights have been activated by our walkthrough, but otherwise the office is dark and weirdly quiet. No pieces of paper or files in here. My gaze returns to Jo. They’re both slightly rumpled: Is it because we’re meeting on a Saturday or the fact that they had a wild Friday night? A sharp stab pierces my ribs. Jo’s hair is tied up today, the wisps skimming down her neck, cheeks bare of makeup. I wish she’d mentioned her boyfriend to me, but perhaps I can’t blame her for that: I’m a high-profile client and it’s none of my business. She was thinking it was one thing, and my thoughts were somewhere else entirely. I should have worked out some guy would have snapped her up ages ago. The first time I met her, I practically forced her to have lunch with me then asked her to mentor me. My chest caves in. I’m sure now that she’s been trying to tread a line of putting me off while also being professional. I’m going to be one hundred percent business from now on: no more flirty conversations.

“Nothing we are about to talk about goes any farther than this room,” I growl, pacing down to the end of the room and back to where they’re sitting.

“Why all the cloak and dagger?” Matt says, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head, a frown creasing his forehead.

I’m even thinking we need a secret code word. I stop and run my hands through my undoubtedly already crazy hair.

“I’ve got something to show you guys.”

I tug my phone out of my pocket and pull up the pictures, placing it on the polished wood table in front of them as I sink down into the opposite seat. They both frown as they lean over the table to look at it.

“What am I looking at?” Matt says.

“Some kind of system diagram,” Jo murmurs, tapping the screen as she angles forward.

“That’s one of our name servers, a map of the connections into it,” Matt adds, magnifying the image with his thumb and forefinger.

I’ve studied these photographs all week and I lean over the table, too, a warm hum buzzing through me that he’s noticed this straightaway.

“Those are the access keys for the servers in Delaware and Cincinnati,” Jo says, and my body straightens as the tightness that has sat in my chest ever since I found the paper starts to ease.

“Right. Denver and San Francisco, too,” Matt mumbles as he examines the list. Their heads are bent over my phone, Matt’s mouth getting increasingly pinched.

“Is this just on your phone?” he says.

I close my eyes for a beat. “Yeah. It’s not synced anywhere else.” We encrypted my phone a while ago.

“Why are you showing us this? Where did this drawing come from?” Matt narrows his eyes on me.

“I’ll explain in a minute but let me ask you a question first. How big a deal would it be if someone outside the company had this information, these keys?”

“Well, potentially they could get right into the system—”

“Did you find them outside the company?” Jo is looking at me curiously.

I nod and their eyes widen. “I have a good friend from college who’s a hacker.” I pause. I’ve mentioned Fabian to both of them before and I wonder how much more to say about his alternative lifestyle. “He’s very, very good at it. He’s got into places that you’d need to leave the country for hacking into. As far as I’m aware, he’s never been discovered or arrested. I noticed these written on a piece of paper on his desk when I was at his place coding last Sunday.”

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