Terminal Value (24 page)

Dylan laughed. “Oh, really? So you think you can murder someone in cold blood and Mantric will take care of it?”

“I told you. I had no intention of harming Miss Carter!”

“I'm not talking about Heather!” Dylan snapped.

Ivan frowned. “You're not?” His eyes flickered back and forth. Then he understood the accusation. “You think I had something to do with Tony's death? But—”

“I don't know. But you're the one threatening Heather. It would not be a leap for the police to believe you could take it to the next step.”

Ivan looked at Dylan. “It was murder, wasn't it?” he said, wrapping his mind around the truth. “I knew it,” he muttered.

Heather rose and moved cautiously to Dylan's side. “Let's go,” she whispered.

“Report me to the police and I'll report your activities to Mr. Williams,” said Ivan without looking at them. “I have your CD. I followed your digital adventure. A record exists of exactly where you went and what you saw.” Ivan drew a deep breath, regaining a measure of confidence. “Tell me what you saw, Miss Carter, and perhaps I will not mention this event.”

“Wait a minute,” said Dylan, holding up a warning hand. “You think you can extort our silence with a threat like that? We're taking this story straight to the cops!”

“What story?” sneered Ivan. “That you broke in here to—Yes, I see now. You broke in to find evidence that, that I—” He rolled his hollow eyes. “That I killed your friend. Is that what you were looking for?” He smiled briskly at Heather. “Go ahead, Miss Carter. Tell him all the incriminating evidence you found that I killed your friend. So you can rush off to the police and have me arrested!” He folded his arms, daring her to speak.

Dylan looked questioningly at Heather. She cleared her throat. “Dylan, I didn't find anything to implicate Ivan in Tony's murder, but nothing that clears him, either.”

“Are you sure?” asked Dylan.

She nodded slowly. “There were video files. No references that I saw to Tony's death.”

Dylan turned to Ivan. “So where were you on May second, when Tony was killed?” he demanded.

Ivan did not answer.

“But it looks like he's been bugging Art and Christine without their knowledge,” Heather said, breaking the silence.

Ivan did not respond, but took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood from his wound.

“You asked me what I saw. I'm telling you,” said Heather. “What are you doing, blackmailing them?”

“You don't know what you saw,” said Ivan.

“Okay, then
you
tell us what she saw,” said Dylan. “Or we'll just ask Art and Christine.”

Ivan's expression was as granite. “Those .avi's are Mantric property, made as part of my job.”

Dylan put a hand on Heather's elbow. “Let's go.”

“Wait!” Ivan took a step forward. “You can't speak of this!”

Heather turned to face him. “Why not? It'll be worth it if it helps us nail who killed Tony.”

“I didn't kill him!” Ivan's narrow teeth showed between his drawn lips. “I don't kill people, Miss Carter.”

“So why won't you tell us where you were the night he was killed?” Dylan said.

“I was here in New York. I didn't break the law.”

“Oh no? You bugged your boss's meetings? I think that would fit the definition of breaking the law. I don't see that being much of a leap to murder. So exactly what were you doing?”

“Protecting myself,” Ivan mumbled.

“So it's true. Art didn't know you were making these recordings.”

Ivan nodded curtly. “Correct.”

“Then perhaps we should inform him!” said Dylan.

Ivan raised an eyebrow. “Frankly, I would prefer you did not.” He glanced at Heather. “Of course, I can't stop you, but then again, you can't ask Mr. Williams about these recordings without explaining to him how you came to have this knowledge. Perhaps we are at an impasse on this question. Do you still really want to ask Mr. Williams?”

“Not particularly,” said Dylan. This was his chance. It was a complex deal, but he knew he had a strong hand. “But if that's the price of nailing you, I'll just have to pay it. What else have you got?”

“Consider this,” Ivan responded. “If my surveillance activities are in any way curtailed, as they surely would be if Mr. Williams found out Miss Carter has seen samples of the videos, he will close ranks with those closest to him, and that will directly affect your ability to find out who killed Tony. And I assure you it wasn't me.”

Heather shook her head. “Why should we believe you?”

Ivan's brow furrowed, and he slumped back against the desk. “I had my suspicions. Ever since Tony's death, the situation screamed murder to me, and I began my own investigation, trying to get what you Americans call ‘an angle.' Now—” He pointed a hand at them, almost accusingly. “You now confirm my suspicions. If there's a murderer in the company, I want to find him and get him out of here. I want to prove I had nothing to do with this.”

Dylan eyed him closely. An hour before, Ivan had been a suspect. Now, he wondered if someone else was the culprit. But who? “It looks like we all want the same thing.”

“So what do we do?” asked Heather, not willing to release Ivan as a suspect.

Dylan nodded. “We'll keep quiet. For now.”

Ivan's face reeked of contempt, and also of a chilling amusement. “I'll destroy this,” he said, picking up the CD and breaking it in half in his hands. “The videos in that archive belong to Mantric, and I can't let you go around hacking into my files. You may have this back.” He picked up Heather's briefcase and held it out.

Dylan, sensing Heather's unwillingness to go near Ivan, grabbed it from him. Ivan moved to the door then turned. His face reflected the old unpleasant aloofness for which he was known.

“I'll be in touch,” he said, and left. His footsteps echoed down the empty hall.

“You get the files?” whispered Dylan as he watched Ivan disappear in the distance.

Heather put a hand to her pendant. “As much as I had room for.”

“Good.”

“Dylan.”

He looked at her. There was relief in her expression—and anger, too. “What?”

Heather gripped his arm. “You can't trust him!”

Dylan shook his head slowly. “I don't, but I want him to become comfortable, to let down his guard. He pointedly avoided giving me an alibi; he skirted the issue. If he is doing his own investigation, even if he did not kill Tony, he may know who did or have a strong suspicion based on his insights into the people around here. And that may be to our advantage.”

Chapter 25

May 13, 10:00 a.m. New York

Dylan and Heather rushed back to the twenty-fifth floor, where they encountered nothing out of the ordinary. They remained silent as they reached the bullpen, and Dylan touched Heather lightly on the elbow, steering her toward his office. To his surprise, she gave him a warning glance and pulled back.

“We need to—” he began.

“Dylan!”

He whirled around, heart in mouth, and saw Rachel hurrying toward him. “What's up?” asked Dylan, trying, with little success, to sound casual.

“Matt needs you. He told me to tear the building down if I had to.”

Dylan glanced around and spotted Heather's back, moving in the direction of the lounge. He turned back to Rachel. “Okay.”

He gathered himself as he walked across the bullpen. Two weeks earlier, the ebb and flow of the office, his relationships with his clients and his staff, had been all-important to him. Clutter frustrated him, and now he felt as if he were walking through an alien landscape.

He sat at his desk and logged onto the LAN. Matt was there, waiting. Dylan acted as if nothing had happened, showing the appropriate response to Matt's comments and questions. His head ached throughout the process.

“Hyperfōn?” Dylan asked. He seemed to see Matt's face at the far end of a dark tunnel.

“Yeah. Everyone's worked like a dog on this—through the weekend and non-stop yesterday. Christ, I think we turned over every stone, pulled in every favor everyone on the team had. They know what's at stake.”

Dylan's mind multitasked as it wandered back to Heather and why she had walked away from him. Was she all right? What had happened with Ivan before he had shown up? “And?” he asked Matt.

“And it's paid off.” Matt lowered his voice.

Dylan's blood began to pump. He leaned in toward Matt and lowered his voice. “Okay. Good. How?”

“You know how when we write code for our clients, there are embedded comments most people can't read? Stuff for the techies in case there was some kind of a glitch or something?”

“Uh-huh.” Dylan waited for more.

“Well, as you know, we always put tags in the source code, tags that make it clear who wrote it and who's licensed to use it. To protect the client. And us.”

“And?”

“And,” Matt said in a soft voice, “well, I kind of hacked into LC's site.”

Dylan shoved back from the desk quickly. “You did what? Jesus, Matt! How exactly did you get your hands on script from LC?”

“Actually a lot of it is sitting right there on their website. All you need to do is fire up your browser and view the source. But the important stuff—” Matt ran a hand across his bristled chin. “Well, I told you the part about calling in favors.”

“I see.” Indeed he did see. It suddenly dawned on Dylan that he had crossed over to the dark side himself by sending Heather in to hack the Mantric files. Now here he was feigning dismay at how Matt had stolen a competitor's intellectual property. But it was way too late to go back. “So why the hell didn't you look for these tags in the first place?”

“We did. Every piece of code, every page of script. We ran searches for every single tag that would possibly identify Mantric or Hyperfōn.”

“So that's how you figured it out?”

“No. We didn't find a thing.” Matt's voice broke, and he laughed a little. “Then last night, when I was almost asleep sitting at my desk, it dawned on me. We started working on Hyperfōn long before we ever came to Mantric.”

“Jesus,” whispered Dylan. He sat back in his chair and realized Matt had gone back to the old MobiCelus tags and tried them instead.

Matt nodded in silent agreement. “Yeah. So I came in early and ran the searches again. And what do you know?” He choked. His hands shook. “Hey, presto! The stupid code on a simple end-user log-in error page was riddled with fragments of MobiCelus tags—tags we wrote to protect Hyperfōn. Man. I should have thought of that sooner.” He laughed, then coughed. “They should have, too.”

“Take it easy, Matt.”

Matt grimaced. “Not possible. You do understand what this means, don't you? Someone from Mantric sold us out to—”

“Hey!” said Dylan sharply. “It doesn't mean that at all. Some hotshot at LC could have stolen the code themselves, or someone at Hyperfōn could have snatched it.”

“That's very reassuring,” said Matt sarcastically. “This is a bombshell.”

“Just let me think a minute.” Bombshell indeed. LC had not magically beaten Hyperfōn to the punch, and it didn't look like an inside job at Hyperfōn, either. Someone at Mantric had taken the Hyperfōn business and given it to LC, probably for a considerable amount of money. But what good did that do? They still could not actually prove Mantric was responsible for the theft. It might even be someone in his own division. “Fuck,” he breathed softly.

“Exactly.” Matt slumped back in his chair, looking dazed and defeated.

What a time for this to happen! Dylan's mind tore through multiple options. A year ago, he would not have hesitated to bring the staff together, along with Rob and Heather and Tony. They would brainstorm for an hour and come up with the best way to find out whoever had done this, no matter what the cost. But now, what if he made the accusation but couldn't prove it? Wouldn't he simply be giving Art an excuse to fire him? No, he needed hard proof. Otherwise he would be out with nothing but the shirt on his back, and Tony's murderer would never be found.

“Dylan, I think it's probably best if I resign.”

“No, you're not going to do that. We're not done yet. And we're not going to mention this to anyone, either.”

Matt's eyes widened. “You're kidding?”

“First we need to find out whether it was a sell-out or a theft. Who else knows about this?”

“You and me.”

“Okay. Then keep it to yourself. Of course, I'll report it to Art when I absolutely have to, but I want that to be when we know for sure what happened. If this gets out now, it only hurts us. Plus it would make it harder to find out the truth. Okay?”

Matt drew a hand across his mouth as if to wipe away his surprise. “Okay. But what do I do?”

“You need to focus on personal connections between the MobiCelus employees who had access to the Hyperfōn project and LC. Don't tell anyone what you're doing.”

“Except Rob—right?”

“Of course. We need to be sure no one is overlooked. Rob has a lot on his plate and could use the help.”

“OK.” Matt pulled himself up as if standing at attention.

“Good. Call me if you find out anything. And, Matt, do whatever you have to do, but remember, do it quietly. Good luck.”

“Thanks, boss.”

“Don't thank me. We still have to figure this out.”

Dylan hung up and began reorganizing his thoughts, allowing the memory of Ivan to flow back into his mind like a tide encroaching on an open beach. He had a swift image of Heather standing tall and beautiful, a look of angry triumph on her face and one hand clenched around the flash pendant. He pulled out his cell phone.