Author: Kit Walker
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New Story: “Moriarty & Moran Contribute to Community Welfare”
The Barrie Children’s Hospital is holding its annual fundraising gala, and as usual all of Britain’s brightest luminaries are invited. This year, however, there are two extra guests: former SAS operator Sebastian Moran and his criminal partner, Jay Moriarty.
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Basilisk
“Near as I can tell, about seventy-two hours ago, Basilisk went off the rails — seizing control of other systems, ignoring all user inputs. It was rewriting its own code, faster than any of Thinkt’s engineers could counter. So they panicked — tried to shut it off. Kill it. But Basilisk managed to find an outside network connection. It escaped.”
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Going Rogue
“Some of it is stupidity, but some of it’s advertising. If you’re the kind of person who thinks all publicity is good publicity, there’s no better publicity than telling everyone your product might kick off the apocalypse.”
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Blood in the Water
AlgoDV had been his latest manoeuvre to keep Hodgson from poaching all the choice bits of Wallis’ portfolio for herself. Policy-wise, it was a silver bullet: cost-cutting, forward-thinking, and it played beautifully in contrast to the press disaster brought about by Hodgson’s botched handling of children’s services. Now, though, Wallis had the horrible suspicion it was about to become an anchor round his neck.
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Passing the Buck
Their visit to the police station was short and unfruitful. According to the desk sergeant, Brandon Tyler’s release was “in accordance with standard procedure” — as was their failure to inform Julia he’d been set loose. Wherever Sebastian went, police were all more or less the same: they put most of their effort into the bits of their job that were easy, and did their best to ignore anything that happened to be difficult.
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Emergency Contact
In hindsight, he should’ve guessed Moran’s knife-work would be impeccable. The remainder of his culinary skill, however, was still a mystery. The man’s well-established poshness more or less ruled out the possibility that he’d learned as a child, and Jay had doubts that there were cooking classes on the curriculum at Sandhurst — although, admittedly, he hadn’t checked.
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Anytime You Like
Despite twelve years in the Army and an active social life, Sebastian had never seen this many cocks in one place before. That they were all made of silicone and currently in a bag was a minor detail. “Why do you have so many of these?”
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The Hurrah
“What you are,” Stepan snarled at her, “is a coddled, spoiled brat who has never faced a real challenge in her life. Everything you have—everything—was handed to you because of me. And when you’re found at the bottom of this pretty, expensive staircase with a broken neck, none of your famous friends, none of your stupid things, will have mattered one bit.”
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Turnabout
Kira cut in again; the words “insurance investigator” caught Sebastian’s attention, followed by: “Bad enough we had to clean up a body—”
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How Jay Got to the Safe House
He’d paid particular attention to the door when he designed this place. It was near-impenetrable, difficult to cut through and difficult to pick open. But not impossible, because Moran didn’t have a key. And if this wasn’t Moran, there wouldn’t be much Jay could do about it.