They were, Jay quickly learned, only three tube stops away from his flat in Camden. At mid-morning the underground was merely “crowded” instead of “fucking inhumane”; Jay backed up against the far doors of the car, and Moran positioned himself between Jay and the other passengers. It was too loud to exchange more than a few words, so they rode in silence.
Jay knotted his fingers in the front of Moran’s shirt and relaxed into the warmth of the hand that rested gently on the back of his neck, thumb stroking idly behind his ear.
He was on autopilot as they made their way up out of Camden Town station, and only noticed a few minutes in that he wasn’t on his usual route back to the flat at all. Instead, they’d arrived at the bubble tea shop he frequented with near-obsessive regularity.
Well, fuck it. He needed caffeine anyway.
The tea shop was the quintessential hole in the wall, a tiny space with just enough room for the counter and exactly two booths. Despite looking like the kind of man who asked for a black coffee wherever he went, Moran instead ordered a fruit tea with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what he wanted. And then, with a sheepish little smile, he asked the girl behind the counter if she could please turn down the music.
The music blasting from the shop’s crackly overhead speakers at deafening volume. The music that played the entire time the shop was open, every day, without fail. And to Jay’s utter amazement, the girl melted and immediately turned the volume down.
Jay had once asked for oat milk and nearly been drop-kicked out the door.
They slid into one of the booths, heads bent close together. Jay stabbed a straw viciously through the lid of his tea and said, “I want to kill her. Can we kill her?”
Sebastian glanced quizzically at girl behind the counter, no more than six feet away.
“Not her,” Jay said. “Anya Clay.”
Again, Moran looked over at the counter—this time apparently worried they’d been heard. The girl was taking a selfie. Reassured that no-one who cared could hear them, he said, “We’re talking about the world-famous author?”
“Yes.”
“Then no, we can’t kill her. Unless you fancy spending the rest of our lives on the run.”
“Might be worth it,” Jay grumbled around his straw.
“And since when do children’s authors incite hate crimes?”
“In this case, just within the last few years,” Jay said. “If Clay was a bigot before that, she at least kept it to herself.”
“My point is,” Moran said, “it’s a bit extreme for someone who writes about kids riding dragons.”
“Gryphons,” Jay corrected.
“You’ve read her books, then.”
“Didn’t have much of a choice,” Jay groused. “My parents kept buying them for me. Everyone at school was obsessed.”
Moran frowned, his brow wrinkling; he seemed to be doing maths in his head. “Those books only came out ten years ago.”
“Closer to fifteen.”
“Jay,” Moran said, as if dreading the answer, “how old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
Moran groaned like he’d been punched in the gut and doubled over, his forehead coming to rest on the surface of the table.
“Fuck’s sake.” Jay levelled an unimpressed look at the top of his head. “You’re not noncing me, Moran.”
“I try not to fuck anyone who’s too young to remember 9/11,” Moran moaned into the tabletop.
“Clearly you weren’t trying that hard.”
Moran made a defeated noise.
“If we can’t kill Clay,” Jay went on, ignoring Moran’s theatrics, “we can ruin her instead. Right?”
“She’s doing that job for us.” Moran finally lifted his head from the table, rubbing both hands over his eyes. “Public hate speech does not a good reputation make.”
“But she’s getting away with it, mostly,” Jay pointed out. “The average person doesn’t know or care what Clay gets up to on the internet. Most of them have never met a transgender person in their lives. As far as the world is concerned, Anya Clay is the bedrock of a million childhoods and that’s all that matters.” His fingers tapped thoughtfully on the tabletop. “What we need is an actual crime. Something people can’t ignore.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard to dig up.” Moran still looked haggard, but for now he’d managed to focus on the task at hand. “Nobody gets to be as rich as Clay without a few skeletons in their closet.” After a moment’s thought, he added, “Find me her accountant.”
Mawson & Williams was an old and prestigious accounting firm. It operated from the relatively tiny borough within the greater London area that was officially designated the City of London: a maze of crooked, narrow streets populated by thousands of corporations, twice as many coffee shops, and no living human beings past five or six in the afternoon. For decades, Mawson & Williams’ offices had occupied the top floor of a concrete art-deco monstrosity of a building which was, somehow, no more out-of-place than any other along the same street.
Access to the office past reception was controlled by a pair of security doors on either side of the front desk. Sebastian had told the receptionist he was waiting for his lunch date, a perfect excuse to set up camp in the waiting area and watch as people came and went.
After a few minutes, he fired off a text to Jay:
Nobody has key-cards. They’re all using their phones instead.
Jay’s response arrived within a few seconds:
Must be using an authenticator app with the nfc chips in the phones
Under normal circumstances, breaking into an office like this was easy enough: Sebastian would pick up one of the office drones at a bar or via Manhandl, accompany him somewhere private, and lift his keys while he was otherwise distracted. The thought of doing so now, however, made him uneasy. He and Jay hadn’t talked at all about whatever this thing between them was, and certainly not whether it was exclusive. Sebastian wasn’t keen on pushing that conversation for the specific purpose of figuring out whether he could seduce someone else.
Besides, it was nearly impossible to get away with stealing a phone. People only noticed their keys were missing once their daily routine called for them, hours later—sometimes even the next morning. But they checked their phones all the time, and a missing phone would raise alarm within minutes.
Thinking it over, Sebastian sent Jay another text:
Could you fake a signal from one of those chips?
Yes but I’d need a valid set of credentials first
The kit I gave you has a Pardella in it
Wire it into one of the card readers
Sebastian eyed the nearest card reader. It was directly within the receptionist’s line of sight, and he doubted she’d let him crack it open no matter how charming he was about it.
Affecting a defeated sigh, Sebastian stood. “Looks like lunch is cancelled.”
The receptionist made a sympathetic face as Sebastian turned and left the lobby. He bypassed the antique lifts, instead making for the stairway; there was an access door to Mawson & Williams’ offices here as well, secured by another card reader. This one, however, was well out of sight.
Jay had shoved the aforementioned kit into Sebastian’s hands that morning. It was no bigger than a pencil case, so Sebastian had stashed it in the same pocket where he kept his lock-picks. Each of the components inside was labelled in Jay’s scratchy, god-awful handwriting; the Pardella turned out to be a device about the size of a £2 coin, little more than a tiny circuit board with a few components soldered on.
Sebastian kept a folding knife on him at all times, and he used it to pop the reader out of its wall mount, exposing the wires that led to the security system’s central controller. There were a series of self-stripping connectors along the back of the Pardella that hooked easily into the wires; once it was attached, Sebastian fed them back into the wall and fitted the reader into the mount once more.
Then he turned and headed down the stairs, toward the exit.
Sebastian got his first ping from the Pardella on his way out the building’s front door, as the device intercepted a key-card signal and forwarded the credentials to his phone. A few more trickled in over the walk to the tube station.
Then everyone’s lunch hour ended, and his phone blew up.
As it turned out, some of Mawson & Williams’ card readers were daisy-chained: every signal from the main doors in reception passed through the stairwell reader on its way to the controller. Jay was delighted. Sebastian had to put his phone on silent for a little while.
By around 1900 hours, even the firm’s most devoted staff had gone home for the day. The building’s outer doors were locked; fortunately, Sebastian had a nondescript NFC key fob onto which Jay had cloned a set of pilfered credentials.
He tapped it against the reader. There was a quiet thunk, and the doors unlocked.
Sebastian once again made his way up to the top floor. The reception area was empty; so, by all evidence, was the office beyond it. As he tapped through the doors, his phone pinged.
“How do I turn that off?” he grumbled.
Through the wireless headset Sebastian wore, Jay replied, “I’ll do it for you later.”
Mawson & Williams’ floor had been extensively renovated sometime in the last decade, transforming what was once a cubicle farm into a vast, ascetic open-plan office dotted here and there with glass-walled conference rooms. Only a handful of enclosed offices remained, huddled against the windows; Anya Clay’s accountant, Lynne Bateman, had managed to claim one of these for herself.
The plan was simple: plug one of Jay’s flash drives into Bateman’s computer, leave it there, and wait for her to show up the next morning and log in. Once Bateman had unlocked her machine, Jay could use the remote access granted by the drive to retrieve whatever files he needed.
One look at Bateman’s workstation torpedoed that plan. Her computer was an ageing laptop, plugged into a dock. A flash drive was far too obvious; Bateman would notice it immediately.
“Bateman’s working from a laptop,” Sebastian reported to Jay. “What’s Plan B?”
“I can pull the files through your phone,” Jay replied, thinking as he spoke. “Plug it into the laptop.”
The kit Jay had given him also contained a spare charge cable; Sebastian retrieved it and plugged his phone into one of the USB ports. He opened the laptop, revealing the login screen. “Needs a password. Got anything for that?”
“How old is Bateman?”
There was a family photo on the desk: an older couple, with a daughter who looked to be about university age. “Late 40s, maybe 50s.”
“Check the desk drawers.”
In the second desk drawer was a sticky note with a password written on it. Sebastian typed it in, and the laptop unlocked.
On the desk, the screen of Sebastian’s phone lit up. Notifications popped up and vanished again as Jay accessed the laptop’s hard drive through the phone and started pulling files down to his own machine.
Then it pinged, painfully loud in the silence of the office. Someone had just tapped through the security doors in the reception area.
“Shit,” Sebastian hissed. “Someone’s coming in.”
“Don’t unplug the phone. I’m almost done.”
Sebastian balanced nervously on the balls of his feet, both hands braced on the desk, eyes fixed on the vague shapes moving at the far end of the office. There were two voices, too quiet to properly understand at this distance, but moving closer with every second.
“Done,” Jay barked in his ear. “Go.”
Sebastian yanked the cable free, shoved his phone into his pocket, and shut the laptop. Darting out of the office, he ducked quickly behind a row of desks.
Lynne Bateman strode past, completely oblivious to Sebastian’s presence. At her side was Anya Clay.
Clay walked with a regal bearing that Sebastian recognised from his days at Oxford: the attitude of someone who, even if they didn’t own everyone and everything yet, confidently anticipated the day they would. She wore a long tunic blouse and leggings, alongside an assortment of flashy jewellery that put Sebastian in mind of someone who owned a crystal shop. A bodyguard stood at her back, hovering silently in the darkened room.
Bateman stepped briefly into her office, returning with an armful of papers. Then she led Clay and her bodyguard into one of the conference rooms.
“Clay is here,” Sebastian murmured into the headset, as quietly as possible.
“What’s she doing there after-hours?”
Sebastian peered over the edge of the desk. The conference room contained a widescreen television on a rolling stand; the screen of it lit up as Bateman set up for a video call.
“It’s not after-hours everywhere.” Keeping low, Sebastian crept toward the conference room.
The glass was frosted along the bottom half of the conference room’s walls, allowing Sebastian some cover as he moved between the rows of desks. As he approached, the murmurs of the video call resolved into something a little more coherent.
“That wraps up the paperwork,” said the man on the screen, in an American accent. He wore a suit and possessed a particular insincerity that Sebastian had come to associate with solicitors. “Clay Media LLC is all set up and ready to go. Am I remembering right that you’ve partnered with SFV Studios?”
“That’s right,” Clay confirmed. “I’m executive producer of the project.”
The solicitor grinned. “I gotta say, my kids are gonna be thrilled to hear you’re making a Grimpeak show.”
Clay had a glare that could nail a man to the wall. “That’s still confidential information.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” the solicitor said, backtracking. “Attorney-client privilege. Nothing to worry about.”
Next to Clay at the conference table, the bodyguard—restless and bored—fidgeted in his seat. He was at least a few inches taller Sebastian, broad through the chest and shoulders. There was a casual attentiveness to him that suggested military training. Perhaps even special forces.
The bodyguard turned his head to the side, revealing a square-jawed, stubborn profile that Sebastian recognised instantly.
The next morning, Sebastian knocked on the door to Jay’s converted warehouse flat.
From the other side of the door came a prolonged series of thumps and quiet curses before it flew open. Jay was still wearing the clothes Sebastian had seen him in last night. His eyes were red and bleary; he stared at Sebastian in wordless confusion, clearly baffled to see him standing there.
“You told me to come back in the morning,” Sebastian reminded him. When that didn’t prompt a response, he continued, “It’s morning.”
Jay blinked, then fumbled for his phone to check the time. Wordlessly, he stepped aside to let Sebastian into the flat.
As he passed, Sebastian shoved a paper bag into Jay’s hands; he’d stopped by the nearest coffee shop and grabbed a few pastries for breakfast. Jay fumbled the bag open, squinted at its contents, then—suddenly realising he was hungry—grabbed one of the pastries and tore into it.
All the curtains in the flat were drawn, which explained Jay’s temporal confusion. Most of the lights were also off; the primary source of illumination turned out to be the multiple monitors on his computer desk. The main screen was dominated by some kind of graph, a multitude of nodes connected by a convoluted tangle of paths.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Through a mouthful of pastry, Jay replied, “Clay’s finances.” He swallowed, then went on: “She owns about a dozen different companies. Shuffles money between them so she can qualify for tax benefits.”
Sebastian made a noise of recognition. “My bank tried setting me up with all that, once I started making serious money.”
Jay polished off the first pastry and rummaged in the bag for a second. “‘Tried?’”
“Couldn’t figure out how they were fucking me, so I said ‘no.’”
Jay wandered over and slumped into his desk chair, still eating. “Don’t know why she bothers. She’s already claiming loads of money off her tax for donating to charity.”
“That doesn’t exactly help us ruin her reputation.”
“It might. Most of it’s going to her own charity.” Jay clicked over to his browser, where a polished, friendly-looking website solicited donations for the Scriptus Foundation. “Supposedly, it’s set up to teach poor kids to read. But it doesn’t hand out much in grants—most of the money it takes in is going toward costs.”
“Not uncommon, for a non-profit.”
“I’ve been looking into those costs, though.” Jay pulled up a spreadsheet, pointing out rows with the half-eaten pastry in his hand. “£12,000 paid as a ‘consulting fee’ to Xanthia Hyde—she held a transphobic hate rally in Birmingham a few months ago. And here we’ve got £20,000 for web design services, paid to Annette Damery through her company VueDesign. Her husband, James Damery, is in parliament—he supported a motion to invalidate gender recognition paperwork from countries that allow self-identification.”
“So Clay’s using the charity to funnel money around,” Sebastian surmised. “Is this enough to get her in trouble?”
“Not really,” Jay said. “I looked into it, but the Charity Commission only investigates blatant fraud. There would have to be something much more suspicious on the books to get their attention.”
“Sounds like you have an idea about that.”
Jay’s only response was a nod as he polished off the second pastry.
Running his thumb over the scars that marked the side of his face, Sebastian contemplated the last time he went along with one of Jay’s ideas. “There aren’t any vicious wild animals involved in this plan, are there?”
“Not yet,” Jay replied absently, turning his attention back to the computer. “I think the SFV deal is our way in.”
“How so?”
“Clay keeps a firm hand on any adaptations of her work. So far, there’s never been a Wings of Grimpeak film, or a TV show—every time someone tries to buy the rights, she demands full control of the production and the deal dies off.”
“Looks like someone finally agreed to it.”
“SFV Studios,” Jay confirmed. “Big Hollywood company all the way back to the 30s. Not as big as they used to be, though. They’re just now getting in on streaming—probably hoping to make Grimpeak their flagship.”
“And Clay’s going to be executive producer.”
“Which means she’ll be micromanaging every aspect of that show.” Jay’s hands flew over the keyboard. “I’ve been setting up a cover identity for you. We’ll call her agent, arrange a meeting—”
“About that,” Sebastian interrupted, wincing. “Clay’s got a bodyguard.”
“Right, him.” Jay tabbed through a few different documents. “There was a protest at one of Clay’s book readings last year. Just a dozen people with signs, but Clay decided she was about to be assassinated and hired personal security.” He pulled up a press photo from a charity event; Clay stood in the foreground while her bodyguard lurked over her shoulder, barely in frame. “Ellis Reeve. Ex-army, I think.”
“Royal Marines,” Sebastian corrected.
Jay paused and looked Sebastian in the eye for the first time since he’d started speaking. “You know him.”
“The Special Forces community isn’t all that big.”
“And he’d recognise you?”
“Most likely.”
“Shit.” Jay slumped in his chair, rubbing his hands over his face. “Then we can’t go anywhere near either of them.”
“Well,” Sebastian said, considering their options, “I can’t.”
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