Sebastian soon found himself in a spacious converted warehouse loft in Camden—not the sort of place one afforded on an office drone’s salary. “You’re not really an assistant, are you?”
“Not usually,” replied Sebastian’s rescuer. He spoke softly, with the precise and carefully bland accent of a BBC presenter.
There was a pile of unopened mail on the kitchen counter, which Sebastian paused to riffle through. “So—” he lifted an envelope and scanned the address, “—James Moriarty—”
The envelope was snatched from his hand. “Jay.”
“Jay,” Sebastian repeated, correcting himself. “What the hell is Walter playing at? I know for a fact my fee isn’t high enough to kill over, even with the bonus.”
Jay glanced away, avoiding eye contact. “There are some very important files on that server. Files that BPA can’t afford to lose track of.”
“They wouldn’t try to kill me over that.”
“They would,” Jay said slowly, “if they thought you took the files on purpose.”
Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. “And why would they think that?”
“… Because I was trying to do exactly that when you pulled the server.”
Jay was tense, eyes flicking between Sebastian and the exit, clearly anticipating some kind of violent outburst. His fear turned to confusion when Sebastian burst out laughing.
It was, after all, exactly the kind of stunt he’d been tempted to pull on every client he’d had for the past two years.
“All right.” Sebastian struggled to compose himself. “What are these files BPA is so precious about?”
Jay, who had clearly decided Sebastian was a maniac, said, “Documentation.”
“For?”
“An automated flight correction system that killed two hundred people.”
It took Sebastian a moment to make the connection; when he did, the hilarity of the situation evaporated. “The Sumatran flight. You think Bruce-Partington really was responsible for the crash?”
“I can prove it, if you’re done using their hardware to smash kneecaps.”
Jay glared up at him, and Sebastian couldn’t help but smile. He’d held a knife to this man’s throat not half an hour ago, and yet he had the brass not only to order Sebastian around, but to sass him in the process.
Briefly, Sebastian let himself wonder what he’d be like in bed.
Then he handed over the server.
To his credit, Jay let out only a quiet grunt as he took the unit from Sebastian. He hauled it over to a computer desk in the corner, where a heavy-duty laptop sat hooked up to a pair of external monitors.
Sebastian followed close behind. “Who are you working for?”
Jay plugged the server into a waiting power supply and began hooking it up to his laptop. “Nobody.”
“No black hat in the world takes on a company like BPA for fun.” Sebastian peered over Jay’s shoulder. “Who put you up to it? Another company? The Russians?”
Jay ducked his head and muttered, “Peter Carey.”
Sebastian searched his memory. “I … don’t know who that is.”
“He’s a retired pilot,” Jay explained. “Wrote an opinion piece about Flight 887. Said the plane crashed because Asian pilots ‘learn by rote’ and don’t have the imagination to handle serious emergencies.”
“Sounds like an idiot.”
“He is,” Jay said. “Which is why I decided to prove him wrong.”
“You created a false identity and infiltrated one of the world’s most powerful corporations because someone wrote a shite editorial?”
“You stole a whole server to prove a point.”
Sebastian had to give him that.
Jay sat at the desk and pulled up a command line terminal, typing rapidly. From over his shoulder, Sebastian saw an error pop up.
“Those drives are probably encrypted,” he said.
“I have the key.” With a few keystrokes, Jay had full access. “Pulled it off the CTO’s machine ages ago.”
“You’re good at this,” Sebastian noted, not without admiration.
The back of Jay’s neck flushed, but he kept his attention on the computer. A lengthy search query turned up a folder labelled “APAS.”
“Found that quick,” Sebastian observed.
“I found it last night, right before you pulled the fucking server.” Without turning away from the computer, he waved vaguely in the direction of the sofa. “Go sit down. I need to read.”
The sofa was a big blocky faux-leather thing that had probably come with the flat; despite the late hour, Sebastian wasn’t enthused about settling down there for a nap. Instead, as Jay paged through file after file, Sebastian went wandering.
The flat was sparsely furnished, and what furniture there was looked to have been present before Jay moved in. The kitchen was well-equipped, but clean in a way that suggested it was barely used; the bedroom was similarly spartan, featuring only a mattress and bed frame.
There was, in short, nothing here that Jay couldn’t leave behind at a moment’s notice.
When Sebastian circled back to the desk, Jay was sitting slumped forward in his chair, the heels of both hands pressed against his eyes.
“Well?” Sebastian asked.
Jay inhaled sharply through his nose and sat up. “They didn’t want to retrain the pilots.”
Sebastian settled on the sofa. “Who didn’t? BPA?”
Jay nodded. “The 221 Nova—that was what they were using for Flight 887, a Bruce-Partington 221 Nova—it handled differently than the 221s before it. BPA didn’t want that. They wanted to tell the airlines that flying a 221 Nova was just like flying any other 221, so they wouldn’t need to retrain their pilots.”
“That’s where the automated system came in,” Sebastian guessed.
“The 221 Nova kept pitching up.” Jay began to gesture with his hands as he spoke, the words firing out faster and faster. “That’s bad, obviously. The plane would stall. So BPA developed a system—APAS—that automatically pushed the nose down if the plane’s sensors said the angle of attack was too high.”
“And it malfunctioned.”
“Yes! It got the wrong reading off the sensors and pushed the plane’s nose down, right into the fucking sea!” There was a manic glint in Jay’s eye. “The same system is installed on every 221 Nova by default. It’s not in the manual. BPA barely admits it even exists.”
With dawning horror, Sebastian said, “This could happen again.”
“It will happen again. If BPA revealed what actually caused the crash, every 221 Nova in the world would be grounded. Airlines would start cancelling orders. The company would lose billions.”
“If these planes keep crashing, somebody’s bound to notice.”
“But the longer it takes anyone to find out, the more time Walter has to cover BPA’s tracks. They lose less money by keeping quiet as long as they can.”
“Christ.” Sebastian rubbed his temples; exhaustion and the flood of information pinging around in his brain were starting to give him a headache. “What happens if we go public with this?”
“BPA’s board would fire Walter, probably. It’s one thing to cover up a technical fault that kills people, but it’s another to get caught doing it.”
“What’s Walter’s severance package like?”
“Obscene. And even if he doesn’t get it, he’s still got millions in stock. More than enough money to keep after you, on principle if nothing else.”
“Well,” Sebastian said, with a resigned sigh. “Fuck.”
Jay didn’t respond. He was leaning forward in his chair again, staring at nothing; the fingers of one hand tapped against the back of the other with jittery, restless energy.
He turned and met Sebastian’s eyes. “I have an idea.”
The wireless headset was supposed to fit neatly and discreetly around the curve of Sebastian’s ear. It didn’t, no matter how many times he fiddled with it.
“Every time you do that,” Jay groused in his ear, “it makes a noise. Stop it.”
Sebastian pulled his hand away from the headset and eyed his reflection in the car’s rear-view mirror. “Is this thing necessary? I look like some posh yuppie cunt.”
“You are a posh yuppie cunt. And if you’re going to insist on driving out to the middle of nowhere at this hour, we need to stay in contact.”
Sebastian stepped out of the car and resisted the urge to slam the door shut. There probably wasn’t another human being around for miles, but it was best not to take any chances. “You could’ve just come with me.”
Jay made a disgusted noise. “The countryside and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms.”
The Roylott Gun Club operated out of a Georgian red-brick building surrounded by vast fields that served as shooting ranges. Sebastian approached the club’s side door and pulled a set of lock-picks out of his pocket; the lock opened with only mild effort.
“I’m in,” he reported, shutting the door behind him.
Not for the first time, Jay said, “There are easier ways to get a gun.”
Sebastian shook his head, forgetting that Jay couldn’t see it. “This plan of yours cannot be pulled off with some cheap piece of shit that was smuggled inside a box of sex toys. I need a real fucking gun.”
“Won’t the club notice if one of theirs goes missing?”
“Eventually, yes. If we do this right, not for some time.”
The wood-panelled interior of the gun club was done up like a rustic country hotel, complete with bar. When not in use, the club’s guns were stored in a gun room in the cellar; Sebastian found the door down an access hall.
The lock had no keyhole. Instead, the entire doorknob had been replaced by a slick plastic featureless box with a handle below it. Sebastian tested the handle, which turned freely with no apparent effect on the door’s latch.
“Smart lock,” Sebastian said for Jay’s benefit. “Probably needs a key fob.”
“Can you get past it?”
Sebastian knelt to examine the lock. There weren’t any exterior screws; the whole unit looked to be glued together. At the bottom, close to the surface of the door, was a tiny hole—probably to drain any moisture that built up inside.
He pulled out his phone, opened the search app, and started typing.
“What are you doing?” Jay asked.
“Most locks come with a manual,” Sebastian explained. “A lot of those manuals are digital, these days. If I’m lucky, somewhere online is an internal schematic for this lock.”
“Hmm.”
Beneath Sebastian’s thumb, his painstaking attempt to type “von bork lock manual” completed all on its own. A series of pages appeared and disappeared as his phone paged through results without any input from him.
Sebastian sighed. “When, exactly, did you hack my phone?”
“When you paired the headset,” Jay replied absently, no doubt preoccupied by the search for the manual. “You type too slowly.”
“Right. Stay out of my photos. You won’t like what you find there.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
There was an unmistakable warmth in Jay’s voice, even distracted as he was. Sebastian was far from averse to what it implied, but the tiny quiet internal voice that passed for his common sense reminded him what a terrible idea that was. Sex in situations like this, even casual sex, only complicated matters.
However, he couldn’t resist flirting back: “Suit yourself.”
A PDF popped up on his phone, showing an internal diagram of the lock. When the reader received an authorised signal, it engaged a coupling mechanism inside the lock that allowed the bolt to move—a coupling mechanism that was well within reach of the drainage hole at the bottom.
“Okay.” Sebastian extracted a long, thin pick from his kit. “I know how to get through.”
“You know, the Von Bork website says this lock is ‘unpickable.’”
Sebastian threaded the pick up through the drainage hole until he felt it press up against the coupling mechanism. He turned the handle, and the door opened. “The website’s wrong.”
He descended the stairs and found himself in a large, open cellar packed wall-to-wall with gun cabinets. Most of the cabinets held shotguns or hunting rifles used for target shooting, but Sebastian’s interest lay in the matte black gun safe at the far end of the room.
There was, however, a security camera bolted to one of the ceiling arches, too high up to reach.
“Camera,” Sebastian said. “Don’t suppose you can do anything about that.”
“What kind?”
Sebastian sidestepped around the camera to get a better look, careful not to cross into its field of view. “It’s also a Von Bork. Can’t see a model number, but it looks consumer-grade.”
“Might’ve been packaged with the smart lock. Give me a minute.”
The faint sound of typing came down the phone line.
“It’s wireless,” Jay said. “I can work with that. Turn your phone’s Wi-Fi on.”
Sebastian did as he was told. A few seconds passed, and then the power light on the camera switched off.
“I could get used to this.” Sebastian approached the gun safe. There was a keypad on the door. “All right, the safe is a Holder Security model BC92.”
“Looking it up.”
While he waited, Sebastian studied the safe; it was as tall as he was, and several times as wide. Too big to move on his own. He could peel it within a few hours, if necessary, but that wouldn’t exactly be discreet.
“There’s an alarm,” Jay said. “It’ll go off if the keypad gets too many bad inputs.”
Sebastian spotted a panel next to the door handle. It pried up easily, revealing a keyhole beneath.
“Found the bypass,” Sebastian said. “Does that set off the alarm, too?”
“Hmm. Doesn’t look like it. Sloppy design.”
Sebastian produced his picks. “I’m not about to complain.” He slid a tubular pick into the lock; after only a few adjustments, the safe was open. Inside were the club’s most dangerous toys: a rack of military-grade rifles, for those members who wanted to live out their fantasies of shooting terrorists.
On a low shelf at the bottom of the safe sat a nondescript polymer case.
Jay had found the flat listed for rent online. A quick phone call to the estate agent confirmed there were no viewings planned for the day, which meant there was no-one around to notice as Sebastian picked the front door open and stepped inside.
As he climbed the stairs, Sebastian shifted the shoulder strap of his bag; his back was deeply unhappy with him. BPA’s men were still watching his place, so he’d slept most of the day away on Jay’s horrible blocky sofa. It wasn’t the worst sleep he’d had in his career, but the fact remained that he was no longer an age where such sins against his body could go unpunished.
Once upstairs, Sebastian headed for the flat’s front windows, which offered a lovely view of the route Sir James Walter took on his way home every day. He set the bag on the floor and withdrew the gun case.
His phone rang; he tapped the headset to answer the call. “Getting set up now.”
“Good,” Jay replied. “We’re almost there.”
Sebastian opened the case. The Openshaw A1903 UW was relatively compact for a sniper rifle, owing largely to its shortened barrel. A folding stock made it even smaller when necessary. “Careful what you say around Walter.”
“He’s listening to something on his phone. Can’t hear a thing.”
Sebastian fitted a long suppressor onto the barrel of the rifle. “I’d prefer it if you weren’t in the car.”
“You don’t think you can make the shot?”
“I try not to shoot in the general direction of anyone I don’t want dead.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Jay said. “I drive Walter home every evening. If we break pattern now, that could tip him off. Besides, it’s easier to track the car this way.”
“And if I miss?”
“Don’t miss. Turning the corner now.”
Sebastian propped the rifle on the sill of the open window and put his eye to the scope. Down at the end of the street, Walter’s car sidled into view.
He slotted the magazine into place. The UW was chambered for subsonic ammunition; that, plus the short barrel, limited its effective range. The car would have to be very close.
“You know,” Jay said idly in his ear, “you could just kill him.”
“I’d never get away with it.” The car crept closer. “And I like your plan better. Ready?”
“Ready.”
Sebastian sighted on the front tire. “Remember to go limp when you lose control of the car.”
He took a breath, released it, and gently squeezed the trigger.
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