Arthur Cadogan West, executive assistant, was accustomed to running errands with his employers after-hours. But Arthur Cadogan West was an identity that had been constructed only two weeks ago. Jay Moriarty, the man who’d constructed it, was about ready to stab his temporary “boss.”
Said boss, Sir James Walter, was utterly unconcerned about making his assistant work overtime and even less concerned that he was late for his 8:00 meeting with Captain Moran.
The Bagatelle was a private members’ club in Pall Mall—the kind of establishment that had once been called a “gentleman’s club,” before the exclusion of women became somewhat unfashionable. It restricted its membership to former British Army officers; this, in addition to its dated facilities, meant it was largely ignored by the new money crowd that had flocked to London’s other clubs in recent years.
Which was, to the Bagatelle’s members, exactly the appeal of the place.
BPA’s file on their favourite security consultant was fairly comprehensive. Captain Sebastian Moran, late of 22 SAS, was the son of Sir Augustus Moran, career civil servant and former ambassador to Iran. Sebastian had joined the Army after university and, following three terms of service, left in 2021. For the past two years he’d been a consultant in the private sector.
They found Moran in the library, between hands of a poker game; he wore a Henley and jeans, just barely skirting the limits of the Bagatelle’s dress code. There was something of the archetypal square-jawed special forces man about him, although he was lean and rangy where others of his breed tended toward burly and broad. He possessed an indolent grace that put Jay in mind of a big cat, shuffling a deck of cards with long, deft fingers.
If Jay hadn’t already been watching Moran’s hands, he’d never have seen it. With a quick twitch of those nimble fingers, Moran slipped one card from the bottom of the deck up onto the top. He shuffled a few more cards over it, then repeated the move with a second card from the bottom.
Swiftly, efficiently, and unnoticed, Moran was stacking the deck.
He glanced up when Walter entered the room, then nodded toward the balcony and stepped away from the table. It only took a second or two for Walter and Jay to join him, but in that short time, something about the man had fundamentally transformed.
Moran’s posture, his mannerisms, even the micro-expressions on his face—they’d all changed, switching flawlessly from one persona to another. It was as if an entirely different man had settled beneath Moran’s skin.
And Walter hadn’t noticed. He and Moran exchanged pleasantries; then, Moran said, “You’ve got a new assistant.”
Jay froze under Moran’s calculating gaze. In the ten days or so he’d been accompanying Walter to meetings, almost everyone had dismissed him immediately—if they noticed him at all. But Moran’s attention was direct and intent, studying Jay with casual but genuine interest.
Instinctively, Jay sought out the nearest exit.
“Hmm? Oh, yes. Just started.” To Jay’s relief, Walter immediately changed the subject: “How is your father, these days?”
Moran flinched so slightly most people wouldn’t have noticed. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
Sore subject, then. Probably not on speaking terms.
Jay stood quietly in Walter’s shadow as he and Moran worked out the deal. Moran’s voice lacked the upper-class bluster that Jay expected; he spoke in quiet and level tones, with an accent that suggested a conscious effort not to sound like a posh twit. Maybe it was part of his training—most penetration testing was performed by civilians with technical backgrounds, but it no doubt delighted Walter to hire a former special forces operator instead.
Then the deal was concluded, and Jay followed Walter from the room, his mind whirring with possibilities.
Moran’s test would be the perfect cover.
Jay’s neck ached. He rolled it from side to side to ease the pain, but didn’t move from where he sat hunched over his laptop.
Given infinite time and resources, it would be entirely possible to tunnel into BPA’s servers without ever setting foot inside the building. But Jay had neither infinite time nor infinite resources, and the weakest component of any system was the human one.
His cover as Arthur Cadogan West provided a desk and computer just outside the CEO’s office. He’d left the latter running when he departed the office that afternoon; he’d also set up a remote desktop connection to his personal machine at home.
As a mere executive assistant, Cadogan West didn’t have access to the servers that housed BPA’s schematics and design documentation. However, the company’s CTO—who hadn’t written a single line of code in decades—demanded full permissions on every project. Said CTO kept his login credentials on a sticky note inside his desk drawer, which Jay had managed to photograph while snooping around the C-suite’s offices last week.
Jay punched in the CTO’s password, pulled up the directory, and began to sift through the contents of the drives, adjusting his search query as he went to filter down the results.
A folder labelled “APAS” caught his attention. It sat within the general design repository for the 221 Nova: the latest model of BPA’s signature short-haul commercial jet. A quick check of the directory revealed several files with “887” in the title.
It was exactly what Jay was looking for, and he tapped out a command to copy down the whole folder. Mid-keystroke, the progression of text across his screen froze.
“Fuck,” he hissed. He mashed the space key; the cursor didn’t move. The whole terminal had locked up.
Then, it disconnected entirely.
“Fuck.” Jay pulled up another terminal and punched in the path for the design repository. All he got was an error:
The system cannot find the drive specified.
Jay slumped back in his chair, blood pounding in his ears. “What the fuck?”
Walter was already in his office and shouting when Jay arrived at BPA’s headquarters the next morning.
A few days after he started this job, Jay had managed to plant a bug in Walter’s office. With all the commotion, nobody was watching the lowly assistant; Jay settled behind his desk, tucked an earbud into his ear, and pulled up the bug’s feed on his phone.
“You told me,” Walter was saying, “that even if he stole another drive, he wouldn’t get anything.”
“We use redundant arrays in all our servers.” The second voice belonged to Bruce-Partington’s head of IT. “Removing one drive degrades the array, but the drive itself only has bits and pieces of any file stored on the server. Nothing reconstructible. We weren’t expecting him to take the entire server. And then there’s the logs …”
Walter’s voice was low and full of dread when he replied, “The logs?”
“Someone accessed the directory for that server just before Moran pulled it.”
Jay swore quietly to himself and glanced at the office door, shifting toward the edge of his chair in case he needed to run.
“You’re telling me he checked to see which files were on it?”
“… It does seem that way. Yes.”
Jay sighed and settled back in his chair.
There was a long silence from within the office, and then Walter said, “Out. Now.”
The door opened, and the IT lead fled back to the safety of his department.
A moment later, Walter poked his head out. “Arthur,” he said. “I need you to cancel all my meetings for today.” Without waiting for an answer, he backed into his office and slammed the door.
Through the bug, Jay heard a phone ring. Walter answered it with a terse, “Moran.”
Not for the first time, Jay wished he’d hacked Walter’s phone. The man was unusually security-conscious for someone his age, and his phone was undiscoverable over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi; the only other option was to physically lay hands on the device, which so far Jay had been unable to do.
Walter’s side of the conversation was clipped and quiet, but Jay caught an address—a quick search revealed it to be an underground parking garage—and a time: 9:00 PM.
Moran hung up, and Walter immediately dialled another number.
“He just called,” Walter reported to whoever was on the other end of the line. “We’re meeting him at nine. Get your men ready, and make sure they’re armed.”
Jay sat stiff-backed in his chair, taking stock of the situation. BPA had backups of all their important data, but they’d be offline and physically secured, possibly off-site.
Sebastian Moran held the only accessible copy of the files Jay needed. And BPA was about to make him disappear.
It took Jay far too long to lay hands on a clean car. By the time he pulled up outside the parking garage where Moran was to meet Walter, there was no sign of either of them.
Jay grabbed his tablet. A quick scan of nearby Wi-Fi networks revealed that the garage’s security camera was online and very weakly secured.
The camera feed showed Jay a choppy, low-resolution view of the garage’s interior. Walter was already there, as were two of Bruce-Partington’s men: the first stood next to Walter and the van they’d presumably arrived in, while the second lurked by the exit.
Moran was there, too—and, by all appearances, unaware of the danger he was in. He carried the server in one hand.
Jay fumbled for his phone; Moran’s mobile number had been in the paperwork he’d handled for the security test. He dashed off a text:
Its a trap run now
On camera, Moran paused and checked his phone. The second man, the one by the exit, began to approach him from behind.
Jay tapped out another text:
Behind you
Moran moved, and Jay winced as the server collided with the second man’s knees. Between one frame and the next, the man was on the ground and Moran was at the exit.
Jay looked up just in time to see Moran blow through the exit gate, then pause at the sight of the car. He threw open the passenger-side door. “Get in!”
The order seemed to plug directly into Moran’s military-trained hindbrain; he threw himself into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him. Jay hit the accelerator, leaving the garage far behind.
Next to him, Moran took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Are we clear?”
Jay glanced over his shoulder. No sign of pursuit. “I think so.”
“Good.”
Jay had forgotten to watch Moran’s hands.
With a blur of motion, a knife came to rest along his throat. Jay twitched in his seat, eyes darting frantically between the road ahead and the man looming in his peripheral vision.
There were rumours about Moran. By some reports, his squadron was deployed to Afghanistan in the chaos preceding NATO’s full withdrawal from the country. Another officer had died, and not at the hands of the enemy. Officially, Moran had left service voluntarily and without incident—which only meant that, whatever actually happened, nobody could prove it.
“I think you can let me out here.” Moran’s voice was quiet and disaffected, as if it made no difference at all whether he slit Jay’s throat.
Jay tried to speak, but fear strangled his voice to a whisper; he cleared his throat, the motion jostling Moran’s knife ever so slightly. “They’ll be watching your flat.”
“Then I won’t go back to my flat,” Moran replied. “Stop the car.”
He still had a firm grip on the server. It was, at the moment, the only leverage Moran had over Walter; nothing Jay said would persuade him to leave it behind.
Moran was bigger and stronger, even without the knife. But it was hardly the first time Jay had been at the mercy of someone bigger and stronger than he was.
Rage surged up his throat, smothering the fear. “Put the knife away or I’ll crash this fucking car.”
Silence descended over the two of them. Jay squeezed the steering wheel tightly to hide the tremor in his hands.
Then, a soft huff of laughter brushed against the side of Jay’s face. The knife left his throat as Moran settled back into his seat.
“So,” he said. “Where are we going?”
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