Chapter 22: The Information Trade
[Moriarty's Flat, Southwark — September 1, 2008, 2:00 PM]
Priya had colour-coded the opportunity matrix, because Priya colour-coded everything, and because the opportunity was worth the effort.
"Three markets," she said, tapping her laptop screen. The whiteboard behind her was clean—James had banned permanent diagrams after the protocol revision, everything wiped after each session. "Corporate intelligence. Private investigation overflow. And data acquisition for institutional clients. All of them are underserved, all of them pay well, and none of them require anyone to get shot."
James sat across from her at the kitchen table, the new notebook open beside his coffee. The flat had acquired a second chair since Moran's arrival—a creaking Windsor from a charity shop in Bermondsey that Kevin had wrestled up three flights of stairs. The place was still sparse, but it had accumulated the furniture of function: two chairs, a filing cabinet that held nothing incriminating, a coat rack that held nothing at all.
"Walk me through the gap," James said.
"Corporations need competitor intelligence. Patent filings, product timelines, pricing strategies, clinical trial data—anything that gives them an edge. Right now, they use legal competitive intelligence firms, which are expensive and limited. Or they use freelance hackers, who are cheap and catastrophically unreliable. There's nobody in the middle. Nobody who can deliver corporate-grade intelligence through criminal methodology with professional-grade security."
"That's us."
"That's us."
Priya had already begun building. Two hackers recruited through Eastern European forums—one in Bucharest, one in Tallinn, both vetted through three months of test assignments before any real work was offered. Neither knew the other existed. Neither knew Priya's real name. She communicated through encrypted channels using a rotating set of identities, each one purpose-built for a specific relationship.
Beyond the hackers: a former investigative journalist named Diane Marsh, fired from a broadsheet for fabricating a source, who still maintained contacts across London's corporate landscape. And Graham Holt, a disgraced private investigator whose licence had been revoked for illegal surveillance but whose technical skills remained sharp. Holt could plant listening devices in a boardroom during a cleaning shift. Marsh could identify which boardroom was worth planting them in.
"None of them meet each other," Priya said. "I coordinate. They deliver to me. I compile and sanitise. You consult."
"Who handles client contact?"
"Intermediaries. Same cutout system as consulting. The information division operates through a separate communication chain—different phones, different dead drops, different everything. If someone compromises our consulting clients, they hit a wall before they reach information operations. And vice versa."
James studied the structure. It was elegant—Priya had absorbed the compartmentalisation principles from the July restructuring and applied them independently, building her own cell architecture without being asked. She was thinking like an intelligence officer, which was either impressive or alarming, depending on your perspective.
"First client?"
Priya pulled up a file. "Meridian Pharmaceuticals. Mid-tier, London-based. They're developing a cardiac drug that's eighteen months from market. Their main competitor—AxiGen, Cambridge—is running parallel trials with a similar compound. Meridian wants AxiGen's trial data: efficacy numbers, adverse event rates, timeline to regulatory submission."
"Price?"
"They've offered a hundred and fifty thousand for complete trial documentation. I think they'd go higher, but a hundred and fifty establishes the market."
"Methodology?"
"Social engineering. AxiGen's trial coordinator is a woman named Sarah Chen. She's competent but overworked—sixty-hour weeks, two direct reports who've both gone on maternity leave. She's using a personal laptop for work email because her company machine is in for repair. Holt can access the personal laptop through her home Wi-Fi network. Bucharest handles the extraction. I compile."
"Exposure risk?"
Priya pushed her glasses up. "Low. The data theft won't be detected until AxiGen notices their competitor's drug hitting identical efficacy benchmarks, which won't happen for months. By then, the trail is cold."
James closed the notebook. Drank his coffee—lukewarm, which meant they'd been talking longer than it felt. "Do it."
---
[Moriarty's Flat, Southwark — September 12, 2008, 7:30 PM]
Priya arrived with a USB drive and a grin she was trying to suppress.
"Complete trial documentation. Two hundred and forty-seven pages. Efficacy data, adverse event log, regulatory timeline, internal communications about modified dosing protocols." She set the drive on the table with the careful precision of someone placing a trophy on a mantel. "Holt accessed Chen's laptop through an unsecured home network. Bucharest extracted the files in forty minutes. No detection flags, no security alerts, no trace."
"Payment?"
"Wired to Protocol Five accounts this morning. One hundred and fifty thousand. Client wants to discuss a retainer."
James picked up the USB drive. Small. Light. Fourteen grams of plastic holding information worth ten times what they'd been paid for it. The pharmaceutical company would use this data to accelerate their own trials, adjust their compound, beat AxiGen to market by months. The financial implications ran into hundreds of millions. And they'd paid a hundred and fifty thousand—a rounding error on a rounding error.
"Tell the client we'll discuss retainer terms," James said. "But raise the baseline. Two hundred thousand per extraction. We undercharged."
Priya's grin broke through. "Not bad for a girl from Hounslow."
James smiled. A real one—the kind that reached his eyes, the kind that this face wasn't built for but that he'd learned to produce when something genuine warranted it. "Not bad at all."
She left with the drive. James stood at the window, watching Southwark's evening settle into its familiar rhythm of headlights and distance. Three revenue streams now: consulting, assassination, information. Like a real business with three divisions—each one independent, compartmentalised, contributing to the whole without seeing it.
His hands weren't shaking. Hadn't shaken since the Fletcher operation, since the morning with the newspaper and the toast. The numbness was still there—or maybe it wasn't numbness anymore. Maybe it was competence. The difference was academic.
The burner phone buzzed. Not Moran's channel. Not consulting. A new line—Harwell's referral chain, three degrees removed, originating from someone whose name James didn't recognise.
Need discrete assistance. Non-criminal matter. Reputation management. Willing to pay for professionalism. Reference: DH.
David Harwell. The Clarendon Club, the Millbrook documents, the single malt that had tasted like arrival. Five months ago. A different scale, a different James, a different understanding of what this life could contain.
He typed back: Contact Apex Risk Solutions. Ask for Alex Richter.
Two identities. Two worlds. The line between them getting thinner with every phone call and every payment and every door that opened onto rooms he'd never been designed to enter.
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