Chapter 2: The Inheritance
[Moriarty's Flat, Southwark — March 15, 2008, 4:15 AM]
The laptop was under a loose floorboard in the bedroom closet.
James knelt on cold linoleum, prying up the board with a butter knife from the kitchen. The wood cracked and splintered, and there it was—a Dell Latitude wrapped in a plastic bag, alongside a second phone (a Sony Ericsson, better than the Nokia) and a USB drive. He took all three back to the bed.
The laptop's password screen blinked at him. He tried the obvious—moriarty, password, 12345. Nothing. He looked around the flat for clues. A sticky note behind the dresser mirror: M4g!p13. He typed it in. The desktop loaded.
Email first. A Yahoo account—[email protected]. The inbox was chaos. No folders, no system, no filing structure of any kind. Messages from a dozen addresses mixed together, some encrypted with PGP, most not. He spent twenty minutes sorting through the last three months.
What emerged was a picture of a man who had good instincts and terrible discipline.
The original Moriarty ran a small operation—fraud, document theft, occasional intimidation work. Three regular clients who paid for information or burglary services. Revenue was modest. Maybe eight to ten thousand a month, split between whoever K was and at least two other people whose names appeared sporadically. No accounting. No records beyond the emails themselves. Jobs tracked in the subject lines of messages like a man who'd never heard of a spreadsheet.
The consulting part of James' brain—Ethan's brain, his brain, whatever it was now—catalogued the deficiencies automatically. No operational security beyond a floor-hidden laptop. No compartmentalization. No backup plans referenced anywhere. No risk assessment for any job. The Millbrook break-in had been discussed over unencrypted email with enough detail to secure a conviction if anyone bothered to look.
He closed the laptop. Rubbed his eyes.
The man whose body he wore had been a mid-tier criminal with the charisma to attract followers and the sloppiness to eventually get them all arrested. Or killed. Probably both.
Right. So that's the inheritance. A gun I can't shoot, a crew I don't know, and an operation held together with string and bad email security.
He spent the remaining hour memorising what he could. K appeared to be the primary contact—driver, logistics, the operational arm. Two other names surfaced: a Marcus who handled money, and a Priya who sourced information. No surnames in the emails. No photos. Nothing about who these people were beyond their functions.
At 5:40 he dressed. Dark jeans, black jacket, the TAG Heuer watch. He left the gun. The Glock stayed in its shoebox. Bringing a weapon he couldn't use was worse than bringing nothing.
The flat's front door had three locks. He tried the keys from the bedside table until one of them worked, then stepped into the stairwell.
London smelled different from Boston. Wetter. Older. The stairwell reeked of damp carpet and other people's cooking—garlic, something fried, the ghost of a curry from three days ago. He took the stairs down four flights and emerged onto a street he didn't recognise.
Pre-dawn Southwark. Grey buildings, closed shops, a kebab place with its shutters half-raised. The air bit through his jacket. March in London. He could see his breath.
The car park was two blocks east. He walked fast, hands jammed in pockets, shoulders hunched. The body moved with a loose-hipped confidence his mind didn't share. Muscle memory, maybe. The original Moriarty had walked these streets and the body remembered the route.
Level 2. A black Audi A3 sat alone under flickering fluorescent lights. The engine was running. Exhaust curled in the cold air.
James stopped ten feet from the driver's side. Stood. Waited.
The door opened. A man stepped out—mid-thirties, red hair going thin, soft around the middle. Pale. Irish. His eyes darted to James and then away and then back, and his shoulders were already climbing toward his ears.
"Morning, Jim." The voice was Dublin, thick, trying for casual and landing somewhere near terrified. "Right on time. That's— that's new."
James said nothing. Watched.
The man—K, Kevin, it had to be—shifted his weight. Tugged at his jacket collar. Filled the silence because he couldn't stand it.
"So, the Millbrook thing. Right. I've got the route mapped out, the alarm codes from Danny—he's the security lad on payroll, remember?—and the window's midnight to three, give or take. Solicitor's called Millbrook and Associates. Bermondsey. Third floor, like we said. The documents are in a filing cabinet behind the partner's desk. Client wants financial records. Embezzlement proof, something about a competitor. Pays fifteen grand on delivery."
Kevin paused. Licked his lips. His right hand kept twitching toward the car door like he might need to dive back inside.
"You, ah. You're quiet this morning."
James let the silence stretch three more seconds. Long enough to see Kevin's throat bob with a swallow. Then: "Walk me through the building layout."
Kevin blinked. "The— you want me to—"
"Layout. Entries. Exits. Foot traffic patterns. Security rotation. Everything."
"Right. Right, yeah." Kevin reached into the car and produced a folded printout—a building floor plan, crude, hand-annotated. His hands shook slightly when he held it out. "So the main entrance is here, but we go in through the service door round back. Danny leaves it unlocked at eleven-thirty..."
James took the printout. Studied it while Kevin talked. The plan was adequate. Barely. One entry, one exit, same door. No contingency if the entry point was compromised. No discussion of what happened if someone was inside.
"What about security guards?"
"There's no— there's just Danny. He does the rounds, right? One man, Tuesday through Saturday. He takes his break at midnight, props open the service door, goes round the corner for a smoke. We've got three hours."
"And if someone else shows up?"
Kevin frowned. "Like who?"
"Anyone. A cleaning crew. A late worker. A new hire Danny doesn't know about."
"That's— that won't happen."
"Humour me."
Kevin's frown deepened. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "I... don't know. We'd leave, I suppose. Jim, we've done this kind of thing before. Loads of times. It's a simple grab-and—"
"From now on, we plan for things going wrong. Every job."
He said it flat. Not angry, not loud. The voice that came out—this Irish voice, light and precise—carried a weight that had nothing to do with volume.
Kevin stared at him. Something moved behind his eyes. Confusion, mostly. A dog whose owner had started speaking a different language.
"You're... different today."
"Better," James said. "I'm better today."
---
Kevin had brought breakfast. Bacon sandwiches from a garage, wrapped in foil, still warm. He handed one across the centre console like an offering to a deity he wasn't sure was benevolent.
James unwrapped it. Ate. The bacon was too salty and the bread was cheap white and the brown sauce was the wrong brand and it was the best thing he'd ever tasted. His body—this body—was starving. He hadn't eaten since transmigrating. Hadn't thought about it. Now the hunger hit like a wall.
"It's good," he said through a mouthful.
Kevin froze with his own sandwich halfway to his mouth. His eyes went wide. In three years of working for Jim Moriarty, he had never once received a compliment about anything.
"It's— yeah. Sal's, on the corner. She does a decent—"
"Kevin."
"Yeah?"
"After the Millbrook job. I want a full accounting. Every client, every contact, every job we've run in the last six months. Names, numbers, payment history. Everything written down."
Kevin put his sandwich on the dashboard. "You want me to... write it down? Jim, you said never to write anything—"
"I changed my mind." He took another bite. Chewed. Swallowed. "From now on, we do things properly."
Kevin was quiet for a long time. The car idled. London woke up outside—a bus hissed past, a cyclist cut through the car park, pigeons fought over something in a puddle.
"You alright, Jim?"
James looked at him. Measured him. Kevin Doyle was afraid, loyal in the way afraid people were loyal, and completely out of his depth. He drove cars and opened doors and followed orders because the alternative—being alone, being directionless—was worse than being frightened.
Useful. Manageable. Not a threat.
"I'm fine," James said. "Finish your sandwich. We've got recon to do."
Kevin drove them toward Bermondsey. James watched London pour past the windows—a city he'd have to learn street by street, alley by alley, until its geography became instinct. A city that didn't belong to him yet.
The word yet surprised him. But it sat right.
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